m 

ij 

HI 

ill 

III 

THE  MODERN  LIBRARY 

OF  THE  WORLD'S  BEST  BOOKS 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


Turn  to  the  end  of  this  volume 
for  a  complete  list  of  titles 
in  the  Modern  Library 


THE 
RENAISSANCE 


WALTER  PATER 


Introduction  by  ARTHUR  SYMONS 


THE  MODERN  LIBRARY 

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Bound  for  the  modern  library  by  H.  Wolff 


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TO 

C  L. 
February  1873 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 


Two  Early  French  Stories   i 

Pico  Della  Mirandola   24 

Sandro  Botticelli   41 

Luc  a  Della  Robbia   52 

The  Poetry  of  Michelangelo   60 

Leonardo  Da  Vinci   81 

The  School  of  Giorgione   107 

Joachim  Du  Bellay   128 

WlNCKELMANN   147 

Conclusion    194 


INTRODUCTION 


INTRODUCTION 


By  Arthur  Symons 

Writing  about  Botticelli,  in  that  essay  which  first  in- 
terpreted Botticelli  to  the  modern  world,  Pater  said,  after 
naming  the  supreme  artists,  Michelangelo  or  Leonardo : 

But,  besides  these  great  men,  there  is  a  certain  number 
of  artists  who  have  a  distinct  faculty  of  their  own  by 
which  they  convey  to  us  a  peculiar  quality  of  pleasure 
which  we  cannot  get  elsewhere ;  and  these,  too,  have  their 
place  in  general  culture,  and  must  be  interpreted  to  it  by 
those  who  have  felt  their  charm  strongly,  and  are  often 
the  objects  of  a  special  diligence  and  a  consideration 
wholly  affectionate,  just  because  there  is  not  about  them 
the  stress  of  a  great  name  and  authority. 

It  is  among  these  rare  artists,  so  much  more  interest- 
ing, to  many,  than  the  very  greatest,  that  Pater  be- 
longs ;  and  he  can  only  be  properly  understood,  loved,  or 
even  measured  by  those  to  whom  it  is  "the  delicacies  of 
fine  literature"  that  chiefly  appeal.  There  have  been 
greater  prose  writers  in  our  language,  even  in  our  time ; 
but  he  was,  as  Mallarme  called  him,  "le  prosateur  ouvrage 
par  excellence  de  ce  temps."  For  strangeness  and  subt- 
lety of  temperament,  for  rarity  and  delicacy  of  form,  for 
something  incredibly  attractive  to  those  who  felt  his  at- 
traction, he  was  as  unique  in  our  age  as  Botticelli  in  the 
great  age  of  Raphael.   And  he,  too,  above  all  to  those 


xii 


INTRODUCTION 


who  knew  him,  can  scarcely  fail  to  become,  not  only  "the 
object  of  a  special  diligence/'  but  also  of  "a  considera- 
tion wholly  affectionate,"  not  lessened  by  the  slowly  in- 
creasing "stress  of  authority"  which  is  coming  to  be 
laid,  almost  by  the  world  in  general,  on  his  name. 

In  the  work  of  Pater,  thought  moves  to  music,  and 
does  all  its  hard  work  as  if  in  play.  And  Pater  seems 
to  listen  for  his  thought,  and  to  overhear  it,  as  the  poet 
overhears  his  song  in  the  air.  It  is  like  music,  and -has 
something  of  the  character  of  poetry,  yet,  above  all,  it  is 
precise,  individual  thought  filtered  through  a  tempera- 
ment; and  it  comes  to  us  as  it  does  because  the  style 
which  clothes  and  fits  it  is  a  style  in  which,  to  use  some  of 
his  own  words,  "the  writer  succeeds  in  saying  what  he 
wills/' 

The  style  of  Pater  has  been  praised  and  blamed  for  its 
particular  qualities  of  color,  harmony,  weaving;  but  it  has 
not  always,  or  often,  been  realised  that  what  is  most  won- 
derful in  the  style  is  precisely  its  adaptability  to  every 
shade  of  meaning  or  intention,  its  extraordinary  closeness 
in  following  the  turns  of  thought,  the  waves  of  sensation, 
in  the  man  himself.  Everything  in  Pater  was  in  har- 
mony, when  you  got  accustomed  to  its  particular  forms 
of  expression:  the  heavy  frame,  so  slow  and  deliberate 
in  movement,  so  settled  in  repose;  the  timid  and  yet 
scrutinizing  eyes;  the  mannered,  yet  so  personal,  voice; 
the  precise,  pausing  speech,  with  its  urbanity,  its  almost 
painful  conscientiousness  of  utterance;  the  whole  outer 
mask,  in  short,  worn  for  protection  and  out  of  courtesy, 
yet  molded  upon  the  inner  truth  of  nature  like  a  mask 
molded  upon  the  features  which  it  covers.  And  the 
books  are  the  man,  literally  the  man  in  many  accents, 


INTRODUCTION 


xiii 


turns  of  phrase ;  and,  far  more  than  that,  the  man  him- 
self, whom  one  felt  through  his  few,  friendly,  intimate, 
serious  words :  the  inner  life  of  his  soul  coming  close  to 
us,  in  a  slow  and  gradual  revelation. 

He  has  said,  in  the  first  essay  of  his  which  we  have : 

The  artist  and  he  who  has  treated  life  in  the  spirit  of 
art  desires  only  to  be  shown  to  the  world  as  he  really  is ; 
as  he  comes  nearer  and  nearer  to  perfection,  the  veil  of 
an  outer  life,  not  simply  expressive  of  the  inward,  be- 
comes thinner  and  thinner. 

And  Pater  seemed  to  draw  up  into  himself  every  form 
of  earthly  beauty,  or  of  the  beauty  made  by  men,  and 
many  forms  of  knowledge  and  wisdom,  and  a  sense  of 
human  things  which  was  neither  that  of  the  lover  nor  of 
the  priest,  but  partly  of  both;  and  his  work  was  the 
giving  out  of  all  this  again,  with  a  certain  labor  to  give 
it  wholly.  It  is  all,  the  criticism,  and  the  stories,  and 
the  writing  about  pictures  and  places,  a  confession,  the 
vraie  verite  (as  he  was  fond  of  saying)  about  the  world 
in  which  he  lived.  That  world  he  thought  was  open  to 
all ;  he  was  sure  that  it  was  the  real  blue  and  green  earth, 
and  that  he  caught  the  tangible  moments  as  they  passed. 

It  was  a  world  into  which  we  can  only  look,  not  enter, 
for  none  of  us  have  his  secret.  But  part  of  his  secret 
was  in  the  gift  and  cultivation  of  a  passionate  temperance, 
an  unrelaxing  attentiveness  to  whatever  was  rarest  and 
most  delightful  in  passing  things. 

In  Pater  logic  is  of  the  nature  of  ecstasy,  and  ecstasy 
never  soars  wholly  beyond  the  reach  of  logic.  Pater  is 
keen  in  pointing  out  the  liberal  and  spendthrift  weakness 
of  Coleridge  in  his  thirst  for  the  absolute,  his  "hunger 


xiv 


INTRODUCTION 


for  eternity,"  and  for  his  part  he  is  content  to  set  all  his 
happiness,  and  all  his  mental  energies,  on  a  relative  basis, 
on  a  valuation  of  the  things  of  eternity  under  the  form 
of  time.  He  asks  for  no  "larger  flowers"  than  the  best 
growth  of  the  earth ;  but  he  would  choose  them  flower  by 
flower,  and  for  himself.  He  finds  life  worth  just  living, 
a  thing  satisfying  in  essence,  moment  by  moment,  not  in 
any  calculated  "hedonism,"  even  of  the  mind,  but  in  a 
quiet  discriminating  acceptance  of  whatever  is  beautiful, 
active,  or  illuminating  in  every  moment.  As  he  grew 
older  he  added  something  more  like  a  Stoic  sense  of 
"duty"  to  the  old,  properly  and  severely  Epicurean  doc- 
trine of  "pleasure."  Pleasure  was  never,  for  Pater,  less 
than  the  essence  of  all  knowledge,  all  experience,  and  not 
merely  all  that  is  rarest  in  sensation ;  it  was  religious 
from  the  first,  and  had  always  to  be  served  with  a  strict 
ritual.  "Only  be  sure  it  is  passion,"  he  said  of  that 
spirit  of  divine  motion  to  which  he  appealed  for  the 
quickening  of  our  sense  of  life,  our  sense  of  ourselves; 
be  sure,  he  said,  "that  it  does  yield  you  this  fruit  of  a 
quickened,  multiplied  consciousness."  What  he  cared  most 
for  at  all  times  was  that  which  could  give  "the  highest 
quality  to  our  moments  as  they  pass";  he  differed  only, 
to  a  certain  extent,  in  his  estimation  of  what  that  was. 
"The  herb,  the  wine,  the  gem"  of  the  preface  to  the 
"Renaissance"  tended  more  and  more  to  become,  under 
less  outward  symbols  of  perfection,  "the  discovery,  the 
new  faculty,  the  privileged  apprehension"  by  which  "the 
imaginative  regeneration  of  the  world"  should  be  brought 
about,  or  even,  at  times,  a  brooding  over  "what  the  soul 
passes,  and  must  pass,  through,  aux  abois  with  nothing- 


INTRODUCTION 


xv 


ness,  or  with  those  offended  mysterious  powers  that  may 
really  occupy  it." 

When  I  first  met  Pater  he  was  nearly  fifty.  I  did  not 
meet  him  for  about  two  years  after  he  had  been  writing 
to  me,  and  his  first  letter  reached  me  when  I  was  just 
over  twenty-one.  I  had  been  writing  verse  all  my  life, 
and  what  Browning  was  to  me  in  verse  Pater,  from 
about  the  age  of  seventeen,  had  been  to  me  in  prose. 
Meredith  made  the  third;  but  his  form  of  art  was  not, 
I  knew  never  could  be,  mine.  Verse,  I  suppose,  requires 
no  teaching,  but  it  was  from  reading  Pater's  "Studies  in 
the  History  of  the  Renaissance,"  in  its  first  edition  on 
ribbed  paper  (I  have  the  feel  of  it  still  in  my  fingers),' 
that  I  realized  that  prose  also  could  be  a  fine  art.  That 
book  opened  a  new  world  to  me,  or,  rather,  gave  me  the 
key  or  secret  of  the  world  in  which  I  was  living.  It 
taught  me  that  there  was  a  beauty  besides  the  beauty  of 
what  one  calls  inspiration,  and  comes  and  goes,  and  can- 
not be  caught  or  followed;  that  life  (which  had  seemed 
to  me  of  so  little  moment)  could  be  itself  a  work  of 
art;  from  that  book  I  realized  for  the  first  time  that 
there  was  anything  interesting  or  vital  in  the  world  be- 
sides poetry  and  music.  I  caught  from  it  an  unlimited 
curiosity,  or,  at  least,  the  direction  of  curiosity  into  defi- 
nite channels. 

The  knowledge  that  there  was  such  a  person  as  Pater 
in  the  world,  an  occasional  letter  from  him,  an  occa- 
sional meeting,  and  gradually,  the  definite  encouragement 
of  my  work  in  which,  for  some  years,  he  was  unfailingly 
generous  and  attentive,  meant  more  to  me,  at  that  time, 
than  I  can  well  indicate,  or  even  realize,  now.  It  was 
through  him  that  my  first  volume  of  verse  was  published; 


xvi 


INTRODUCTION 


and  it  was  through  his  influence  and  counsels  that  I 
trained  myself  to  be  infinitely  careful  in  all  matters  of 
literature.  Influence  and  counsel  were  always  in  the  di- 
rection of  sanity,  restraint,  precision. 

I  remember  a  beautiful  phrase  which  he  once  made  up, 
in  his  delaying  way,  with  "wells"  and  "no  doubts"  in  it, 
to  describe,  and  to  describe  supremely  a  person  whom 
I  had  seemed  to  him  to  be  disparaging.  "He  does,"  he 
said  meditatively,  "remind  me  of,  well,  of  a  steam-engine 
stuck  in  the  mud.  But  he  is  so  enthusiastic."  Pater 
liked  people  to  be  enthusiastic,  but,  with  him,  enthusiasm 
was  an  ardent  quietude,  guarded  by  the  wary  humor  that 
protects  the  sensitive.  He  looked  upon  undue  earnest- 
ness, even  in  outward  manner,  in  a  world  through  which 
the  artist  is  bound  to  go  on  a  wholly  "secret  errand,"  as 
bad  form,  which  shocked  him  as  much  in  persons  as  bad 
style  did  in  books.  He  hated  every  form  of  extravagance, 
noise,  mental  or  physical,  with  a  temperamental  hatred :  he 
suffered  from  it,  in  his  nerves  and  in  his  mind.  And  he 
had  no  less  dislike  of  whatever  seemed  to  him  either 
-morbid  or  sordid,  two  words  which  he  often  used  to  ex- 
press his  distaste  for  things  and  people.  He  never  would 
have  appreciated  writers  like  Verlaine,  because  of  what 
seemed  to  him  perhaps  unnecessarily  "sordid"  in  their 
lives.  It  pained  him,  as  it  pains  some  people,  perhaps 
only  because  they  are  more  acutely  sensitive  than  others, 
to  walk  through  mean  streets,  where  people  are  poor, 
miserable,  and  hopeless. 

And  since  I  have  mentioned  Verlaine,  I  may  say  that 
what  Pater  most  liked  in  poetry  was  the  very  opposite 
of  such  work  as  that  of  Verlaine,  which  he  might  have 
been  supposed  likely  to  like.   I  do  not  think  it  was  actu- 


INTRODUCTION 


xvii 


ally  one  of  Verlaine's  poems,  but  something  done  after 
his  manner  in  English,  that  some  reviewer  once  quoted, 
saying :  "That,  to  our  mind,  would  be  Mr.  Pater's  ideal 
of  poetry."  Pater  said  to  me,  with  a  sad  wonder,  "I 
simply  don't  know  what  he  meant."  What  he  liked  in 
poetry  was  something  even  more  definite  than  can  be  got 
in  prose;  and  he  valued  poets  like  Dante  and  like  Ros- 
setti  for  their  "delight  in  concrete  definition,"  not  even 
quite  seeing  the  ultimate  magic  of  such  things  as  Kubla 
Khan,  which  he  omitted  in  a  brief  selection  from  the 
poetry  of  Coleridge.  In  the  most  interesting  letter  which 
I  ever  had  from  him,  the  only  letter  which  went  to  six 
pages,  he  says: 

12  Earl's  Terrace, 

Kensington,  W. 

Jan.  8,  1888. 

My  dear  Mr.  Symons, — I  feel  much  flattered  at  your 
choosing  me  as  an  arbiter  in  the  matter  of  your  literary 
work,  and  thank  you  for  the  pleasure  I  have  had  in  read- 
ing carefully  the  two  poems  you  have  sent  me.  I  don't 
use  the  word  "arbiter"  loosely  for  "critic" ;  but  suppose 
a  real  controversy,  on  the  question  whether  you  shall 
spend  your  best  energies  in  writing  verse,  between  your 
poetic  aspirations  on  the  one  side,  and  prudence  (calcu- 
lating results)  on  the  other.  Well!  judging  by  these  two 
pieces,  I  should  say  that  you  have  a  poetic  talent  re- 
markable, especially  at  the  present  day,  for  precise  and 
intellectual  grasp  on  the  matter  it  deals  with.  Rossetti, 
I  believe,  said  that  the  value  of  every  artistic  product 
was  in  direct  proportion  to  the  amount  of  purely  intel- 
lectual force  that  went  to  the  initial  conception  of  it: 
and  it  is  just  this  intellectual  conception  which  seems  to 
me  to  be  so  conspicuously  wanting  in  what,  in  some 
ways,  is  the  most  characteristic  verse  of  our  time,  espe- 
cially that  of  our  secondary  poets.  In  your  own  pieces, 
particularly  in  your  MS.  "A  Revenge,"  I  find  Rossetti's 


xviii 


INTRODUCTION 


requirement  fulfilled,  and  should  anticipate  great  things 
from  one  who  has  the  talent  of  conceiving  his  motive 
with  so  much  firmness  and  tangibility — with  that  close 
logic,  if  I  may  say  so,  which  is  an  element  in  any  genu- 
inely imaginative  process.  It  is  clear  to  me  that  you  aim 
at  this,  and  it  is  what  gives  your  verses,  to  my  mind,  great 
interest.  Otherwise,  I  think  the  two  pieces  of  unequal 
excellence,  greatly  preferring  "A  Revenge"  to  "Bell  in 
Camp."  Reserving  some  doubt  whether  the  watch,  as  the 
lover's  gift,  is  not  a  little  bourgeois,  I  think  this  piece 
worthy  of  any 'poet.  It  has  that  aim  of  concentration  and 
organic  unity  which  I  value  greatly  both  in  prose  and 
verse.  "Bell  in  Camp"  pleases  me  less,  for  the  same 
reason  which  makes  me  put  Rossetti's  "Jenny,"  and  some 
of  Browning's  pathetic-satiric  pieces,  below  the  rank 
which  many  assign  them.  In  no  one  of  the  poems  I  am 
thinking  of,  is  the  inherent  sordidness  of  everything  in 
the  persons  supposed,  except  the  one  poetic  trait  then  un- 
der treatment,  quite  forgotten.  Otherwise,  I  feel  the 
pathos,  the  humor,  of  the  piece  (in  the  full  sense  of  the 
word  humor)  and  the  skill  with  which  you  have  worked 
out  your  motive  therein.  I  think  the  present  age  an  un- 
favorable one  to  poets,  at  least  in  England.  The  young 
poet  comes  into  a  generation  which  has  produced  a  large 
amount  of  first-rate  poetry,  and  an  enormous  amount  of 
good  secondary  poetry.  You  know  I  give  a  high  place 
to  the  literature  of  prose  as  a  fine  art,  and  therefore  hope 
you  won't  think  me  brutal  in  saying  that  the  admirable 
qualities  of  your  verse  are  those  also  of  imaginative 
prose ;  as  I  think  is  the  case  also  with  much  of  Brown- 
ing's finest  verse.  I  should  say,  make  prose  your  prin- 
cipal metier,  as  a  man  of  letters,  and  publish  your  verse 
as  a  more  intimate  gift  for  those  who  already  value  you 
for  your  pedestrian  work  in  literature.  I  should  think 
you  ought  to  find  no  difficulty  in  finding  a  publisher  for 
poems  such  as  those  you  have  sent  to  me. 

I  am  more  than  ever  anxious  to  meet  you.  Letters  are 
such  poor  means  of  communication.   Don't  come  to  Lon- 


INTRODUCTION  xix 

don  without  making  an  appointment  to  come  and  see  me 
here.  Very  sincerely  yours, 

Walter  Pater. 

"Browning,  one  of  my  best-loved  writers/'  is  a  phrase 
I  find  in  his  first  letter  to  me,  in  December,  1886,  thank- 
ing me  for  a  little  book  on  Browning  which  I  had  just 
published.  There  is,  I  think,  no  mention  of  any  other 
writer  except  Shakespeare  (besides  the  reference  to  Ros- 
setti  which  I  have  just  quoted)  in  any  of  the  fifty  or  sixty 
letters  which  I  have  from  him.  Everything  that  is  said 
about  books  is  a  direct  matter  of  business :  work  which 
he  was  doing,  of  which  he  tells  me,  or  which  I  was  doing, 
about  which  he  advises  and  encourages  me. 

In  practical  things  Pater  was  wholly  vague,  troubled 
by  their  persistence  when  they  pressed  upon  him.  To 
wrap  up  a  book  to  send  by  post  was  an  almost  intolerable 
effort,  and  he  had  another  reason  for  hesitating.  "I  take 
your  copy  of  Shakespeare's  sonnets  with  me,"  he  writes 
in  June,  1889,  "hoping  to  be  able  to  restore  it  to  you 
there  lest  it  should  get  bruised  by  transit  through  the 
post."  He  wrote  letters  with  distaste,  never  really  well, 
and  almost  always  with  excuses  or  regrets  in  them :  "Am 
so  overburdened  (my  time,  I  mean)  just  now  with  pupils, 
lectures,  and  the  making  thereof";  or,  with  hopes  for  a 
meeting:  "Letters  are  such  poor  means  of  communica- 
tion :  when  are  we  to  meet  ?"  or,  as  a  sort  of  hasty  make- 
shift :  "I  send  this  prompt  answer,  for  I  know  by  experi- 
ence that  when  I  delay  my  delays  are  apt  to  be  lengthy." 
A  review  took  him  sometimes  a  year  to  get  through  and 
remained  in  the  end,  like  his  letters,  a  little  cramped, 
never  finished  to  the  point  of  ease,  like  his  published 


XX 


INTRODUCTION 


writings.  To  lecture  was  a  great  trial  to  him.  Two  of 
the  three  lectures  which  I  have  heard  in  my  life  were 
given  by  Pater,  one  on  Merimee,  at  the  London  Institu- 
tion, in  November,  1890,  and  the  other  on  Raphael,  at 
Toynbee  Hall,  in  1892.  I  never  saw  a  man  suffer  a 
severer  humiliation.  The  act  of  reading  his  written  lec- 
ture was  an  agony  which  communicated  itself  to  the  main 
part  of  the  audience.  Before  going  into  the  hall  at  White- 
chapel  he  had  gone  into  a  church  to  compose  his  mind  a 
little,  between  the  discomfort  of  the  underground  rail- 
way and  the  distress  of  the  lecture-hall. 

In  a  room,  if  he  was  not  among  very  intimate  friends, 
Pater  was  rarely  quite  at  his  ease,  but  he  liked  being 
among  people,  and  he  made  the  greater  satisfaction  over- 
come the  lesser  reluctance.  He  was  particularly  fond  of 
cats,  and  I  remember  one  evening,  when  I  had  been  din- 
ing with  him  in  London,  the  quaint,  solemn,  and  perfectly 
natural  way  in  which  he  took  up  the  great  black  Per- 
sian, kissed  it,  and  set  it  down  carefully  again  on  his 
way  upstairs.  Once  at  Oxford  he  told  me  that  M.  Bour- 
get  had  sent  him  the  first  volume  of  his  Essais  de  Psy- 
chologie  Contemporaine,  and  that  the  cat  had  got  hold  of 
the  book  and  torn  up  the  part  containing  the  essay  on 
Baudelaire,  "and  as  Baudelaire  was  such  a  lover  of  cats 
I  thought  she  might  have  spared  him!" 

We  were  talking  once  about  fairs,  and  I  had  been  say- 
ing how  fond  I  was  of  them.  He  said :  "I  am  fond  of 
them,  too.  I  always  go  to  fairs.  I  am  getting  to  find  they 
are  very  similar."  Then  he  began  to  tell  me  about  the 
fairs  in  France,  and  I  remember,  as  if  it  were  an  un- 
published fragment  in  one  of  his  stories,  the  minute, 
colored  impression  of  the  booths,  the  little  white  horses 


INTRODUCTION 


xxi 


of  the  "roundabouts,"  and  the  little  wild  beast  shows,  in 
which  what  had  most  struck  him  was  the  interest  of  the 
French  peasant  in  the  wolf,  a  creature  he  might  have 
seen  in  his  own  woods.  "An  English  clown  would  not 
have  looked  at  a  wolf  if  he  could  have  seen  a  tiger." 

I  once  asked  Pater  if  his  family  was  really  connected 
with  that  of  the  painter,  Jean-Baptiste  Pater.  He  said: 
"I  think  so,  I  believe  so,  I  always  say  so."  The  rela- 
tionship has  never  been  verified,  but  one  would  like  to 
believe  it;  to  find  something  lineally  Dutch  in  the  Eng- 
lish writer.  It  was,  no  doubt,  through  this  kind  of 
family  interest  that  he  came  to  work  upon  Goncourt's 
essay  and  the  contemporary  Life  of  Watteau  by  the 
Count  de  Caylus,  printed  in  the  first  series  of  L'Art  du 
XVIII  Steele,  out  of  which  he  has  made  certainly  the 
most  living  of  his  Imaginary  Portraits,  that  Prince  of 
Court  Painters  which  is  supposed  to  be  the  journal  of  a 
sister  of  Jean-Baptiste  Pater,  whom  we  see  in  one  of 
Watteau's  portraits  in  the  Louvre.  As  far  back  as  1889 1 
Pater  was  working  towards  a  second  volume  of  Imagi- 
nary Portraits  of  which  Hippolytus  Veiled  was  to  have 
been  one.  He  had  another  subject  in  Moroni's  Portrait 
of  a  Tailor  in  the  National  Gallery,  whom  he  was  going 
to  make  a  Burgomaster;  and  another  was  to  have  been 
a  study  of  life  in  the  time  of  the  Albigensian  persecution. 
There  was  also  to  be  a  modern  study:  could  this  have 
been  Emerald  U thwart?    No  doubt  Apollo  in  Picardy, 

1  In  this  same  year  he  intended  to  follow  the  Appreciations  by 
a  volume  of  Studies  of  Greek  Remains,  in  which  he  then  mear,t 
to  include  the  studies  in  Platonism,  not  yet  written;  and  he 
thought  of  putting  together  a  volume  of  "theory,"  which  was  to 
include  the  essay  on  Style.  In  two  or  three  years'  time,  he 
thought,  Gaston  de  Latour  would  be  finished. 


xxii 


INTRODUCTION 


published  in  1893,  would  have  gone  into  the  volume.  The 
Child  in  the  House,  which  was  printed  as  an  Imaginary 
Portrait,  in  Macmillan's  Magazine  in  1878,  was  really 
meant  to  be  the  first  chapter  of  a  romance  which  was  to 
show  "the  poetry  of  modern  life/*  something,  he  said, 
as  Aurora  Leigh  does.  There  is  much  personal  detail  in 
it,  the  red  hawthorn,  for  instance,  and  he  used  to  talk  to 
me  of  the  old  house  at  Tunbridge,  where  his  great-aunt 
lived,  and  where  he  spent  much  of  his  time  when  a  child. 
He  remembered  the  gipsies  there,  and  their  caravans, 
when  they  came  down  for  the  hop-picking;  and  the  old 
lady  in  her  large  cap  going  out  on  the  lawn  to  do  battle 
with  the  surveyors  who  had  come  to  mark  out  a  rail- 
way across  it;  and  his  terror  of  the  train,  and  of  "the 
red  flag,  which  meant  blood."  It  was  because  he  always 
dreamed  of  going  on  with  it  that  he  did  not  reprint 
this  imaginary  portrait  in  the  book  of  Imaginary  Por- 
traits, but  he  did  not  go  on  with  it  because,  having  begun 
the  long  labor  of  Marius,  it  was  out  of  his  mind  for 
maiiy  years,  and  when,  in  1889,  he  still  spoke  of  finishing 
it,  he  was  conscious  that  he  could  never  continue  it  in  the 
same  style,  and  that  it  would  not  be  satisfactory  to  re- 
write it  in  his  severer,  later  manner.  It  remains,  per- 
haps fortunately,  a  fragment,  to  which  no  continuation 
could  ever  add  a  more  essential  completeness. 

Style,  in  Pater,  varied  more  than  is  generally  sup- 
posed, in  the  course  of  his  development,  and,  though 
never  thought  of  as  a  thing  apart  from  what  it  expresses, 
was  with  him  a  constant  preoccupation.  Let  writers,  he 
said,  "make  time  to  write  English  more  as  a  learned  lan- 
guage." It  has  been  said  that  Ruskin,  De  Quincey,  and 
Flaubert  were  among  the  chief  "origins"  of  Pater's  style ; 


INTRODUCTION 


xxiii 


it  is  curiously  significant  that  matter,  in  Pater,  was  de- 
veloped before  style,  and  that  in  the  bare  and  angular 
outlines  of  the  earliest  fragment,  Diaphaneite,  there  is 
already  the  substance  which  is  to  be  clothed  upon  by 
beautiful  and  appropriate  flesh  in  the  Studies  in  the  Re- 
naissance. Ruskin,  I  never  heard  him  mention,  but  I 
do  not  doubt  that  there,  to  the  young  man  beginning  to 
concern  himself  with  beauty  in  art  and  literature,  was 
at  least  a  quickening  influence.  Of  De  Quincey  he  spoke 
with  an  admiration  which  I  had  difficulty  in  sharing, 
and  I  remember  his  showing  me  with  pride  a  set  of  his 
works  bound  in  half-parchment,  with  pale  gold  letter- 
ing on  the  white  backs,  and  with  the  cinnamon  edges 
which  he  was  so  fond  of.  Of  Flaubert  we  rarely  met 
without  speaking.  He  thought  Julien  I'Hospitalier  as 
perfect  as  anything  he  had  done.  L'Education  Senti- 
mentale  was  one  of  the  books  which  he  advised  me  to 
read;  that,  and  Le  Rouge  et  le  Noir  of  Stendhal;  and 
he  spoke  with  particular  admiration  of  two  episodes  in 
the  former,  the  sickness  and  the  death  of  the  child.  Of 
the  Goncourts  he  spoke  with  admiration  tempered  by 
dislike.  Their  books  often  repelled  him,  yet  their  way  of  > 
doing  things  seemed  to  him  just  the  way  things  should 
be  done ;  and  done  before  almost  any  one  else.  He  often 
read  Madame  Gervaisais,  and  he  spoke  of  Cherie  (for  all 
its  "immodesty")  as  an  admirable  thing,  and  a  model  for 
all  such  studies. 

Once,  as  we  were  walking  in  Oxford,  he  pointed  to 
a  window  and  said,  with  a  slow  smile :  "That  is  where  I 
get  my  Zolas."  He  was  always  a  little  on  his  guard  in 
respect  of  books ;  and,  just  as  he  read  Flaubert  and  Gon- 
court  because  they  were  intellectual  neighbors,  so  he 


xxiv 


INTRODUCTION 


could  read  Zola  for  mere  pastime,  knowing  that  there 
would  be  nothing  there  to  distract  him.  I  remember 
telling  him  about  The  Story  of  an  African  Farm,  and  of 
the  wonderful  human  quality  in  it.  He  said,  repeating  his 
favorite  formula:  "No  doubt  you  are  quite  right;  but 
I  do  not  suppose  I  shall  ever  read  it."  And  he  explained 
to  me  that  he  was  always  writing  something,  and  that 
while  he  was  writing  he  did  not  allow  himself  to  read 
anything  which  might  possibly  affect  him  too  strongly, 
by  bringing  a  new  current  of  emotion  to  bear  upon  him. 
He  was  quite  content  that  his  mind  should  "keep  as  a 
solitary  prisoner  its  own  dream  of  a  world" ;  it  was  that 
prisoner's  dream  of  a  world  that  it  was  his  whole  busi- 
ness as  a  writer  to  remember,  to  perpetuate. 


PREFACE 


Many  attempts  have  been  made  by  writers  on  art 
and  poetry  to  define  beauty  in  the  abstract,  to  express  it 
in  the  most  general  terms,  to  find  some  universal  for- 
mula for  it.  The  value  of  these  attempts  has  most  often 
been  in  the  suggestive  and  penetrating  things  said  by  the 
way.  Such  discussions  help  us  very  little  to  enjoy  what 
has  been  well  done  in  art  or  poetry,  to  discriminate  be- 
tween what  is  more  and  what  is  less  excellent  in  them, 
or  to  use  words  like  beauty,  excellence,  art,  poetry,  with 
a  more  precise  meaning  than  they  would  otherwise  have. 
Beauty,  like  all  other  qualities  presented  to  human  ex- 
perience, is  relative;  and  the  definition  of  it  becomes 
unmeaning  and  useless  in  proportion  to  its  abstractness. 
To  define  beauty,  not  in  the  most  abstract  but  in  the 
most  concrete  terms  possible,  to  find  not  its  universal 
formula,  but  the  formula  which  expresses  most  ade- 
quately this  or  that  special  manifestation  of  it,  is  the 
aim  of  the  true  student  of  aesthetics. 

"To  see  the  object  as  in  itself  it  really  is,"  has  been 
justly  said  to  be  the  aim  of  all  true  criticism  whatever; 
and  in  aesthetic  criticism  the  first  step  towards  seeing 
one's  object  as  it  really  is,  is  to  know  one's  own  impres- 
sion as  it  really  is,  to  discriminate  it,  to  realise  it  dis- 
tinctly. The  objects  with  which  aesthetic  criticism 
deals — music,  poetry,  artistic  and  accomplished  forms 
of  human  life — are  indeed  receptacles  of  so  many 

XXV 


xxvi 


PREFACE 


powers  or  forces:  they  possess,  like  the  products  of 
nature,  so  many  virtues  or  qualities.  What  is  this  song 
or  picture,  this  engaging  personality  presented  in  life  or 
in  a  book,  to  me?  What  effect  does  it  really  produce 
on  me?  Does  it  give  me  pleasure?  and  if  so,  what  sort 
or  degree  of  pleasure?  How  is  my  nature  modified  by 
its  presence,  and  under  its  influence?  The  answers  to 
these  questions  are  the  original  facts  with  which  the 
aesthetic  critic  has  to  do;  and,  as  in  the  study  of  light, 
of  morals,  of  number,  one  must  realise  such  primary 
data  for  one's  self,  or  not  at  all.  And  he  who  experi- 
ences these  impressions  strongly,  and  drives  directly  at 
the  discrimination  and  analysis  of  them,  has  no  need  to 
trouble  himself  with  the  abstract  question  what  beauty 
is  in  itself,  or  what  its  exact  relation  to  truth  or  experi- 
ence— metaphysical  questions,  as  unprofitable  as  meta- 
physical questions  elsewhere.  He  may  pass  them  all  by 
as  being,  answerable  or  not,  of  no  interest  to  him. 

The  aesthetic  critic,  then,  regards  all  the  objects  with 
which  he  has  to  do,  all  works  of  art,  and  the  fairer 
forms  of  nature  and  human  life,  as  powers  or  forces 
producing  pleasurable  sensations,  each  of  a  more  or  less 
peculiar  or  unique  kind.  This  influence  he  feels,  and 
wishes  to  explain,  by  analysing  and  reducing  it  to  its 
elements.  To  him,  the  picture,  the  landscape,  the  en- 
gaging personality  in  life  or  in  a  book,  La  Gioconda, 
the  hills  of  Carrara,  Pico  of  Mirandola,  are  valuable 
for  their  virtues,  as  we  say,  in  speaking  of  a  herb, 
a  wine,  a  gem;  for  the  property  each  has  of  affecting 
one  with  a  special,  a  unique,  impression  of  pleasure. 
Our  education  becomes  complete  in  proportion  as  our 
susceptibility  to  these  impressions  increases  in  depth  and 


PREFACE 


xxvii 


variety.  And  the  function  of  the  aesthetic  critic  is  to 
distinguish,  to  analyse,  and  separate  from  its  adjuncts, 
the  virtue  by  which  a  picture,  a  landscape,  a  fair  per- 
sonality in  life  or  in  a  book,  produces  this  special  im- 
pression of  beauty  or  pleasure,  to  indicate  what  the 
source  of  that  impression  is,  and  under  what  conditions 
it  is  experienced.  His  end  is  reached  when  he  has  dis- 
engaged that  virtue,  and  noted  it,  as  a  chemist  notes 
some  natural  element,  for  himself  and  others;  and  the 
rule  for  those  who  would  reach  this  end  is  stated  with, 
great  exactness  in  the  words  of  a  recent  critic  of  Sainte- 
Beuve: — De  se  homer  a  connaitre  de  pres  les  belles 
choses,  et  a  s'en  nourrir  en  exquis  amateurs,  en  hu- 
manistes  aceomplis. 

What  is  important,  then,  is  not  that  the  critic  should 
possess  a  correct  abstract  definition  of  beauty  for  the 
intellect,  but  a  certain  kind  of  temperament,  the  power 
of  being  deeply  moved  by  the  presence  of  beautiful 
objects.  He  will  remember  always  that  beauty  exists 
in  many  forms.  To  him  all  periods,  types,  schools  of 
taste,  are  in  themselves  equal.  In  all  ages  there  have 
been  some  excellent  workmen,  and  some  excellent  work 
done.  The  question  he  asks  is  always: — In  whom  did 
the  stir,  the  genius,  the  sentiment  of  the  period  find 
itself?  where  was  the  receptacle  of  its  refinement,  its 
elevation,  its  taste?  "The  ages  are  all  equal,"  says 
William  Blake,  "but  genius  is  always  above  its  age." 

Often  it  will  require  great  nicety  to  disengage  this 
virtue  from  the  commoner  elements  with  which  it  may 
be  found  in  combination.  Few  artists,  not  Goethe  or 
Byron  even,  work  quite  cleanly,  casting  off  all  debris, 
and  leaving  us  only  what  the  heat  of  their  imagination 


xxviii 


PREFACE 


has  wholly  fused  and  transformed.  Take,  for  instance, 
the  writings  of  Wordsworth.  The  heat  of  his  genius, 
entering  into  the  substance  of  his  work,  has  crystallised 
a  part,  but  only  a  part,  of  it;  and  in  that  great  mass  of 
verse  there  is  much  which  might  well  be  forgotten.  But 
scattered  up  and  down  it,  sometimes  fusing  and  trans- 
forming entire  compositions,  like  the  Stanzas  on  Resolu- 
tion and  Independence,  or  the  Ode  on  the  Recollections 
of  Childhood,  sometimes,  as  if  at  random,  depositing  a 
fine  crystal  here  or  there,  in  a  matter  it  does  not  wholly 
search  through  and  transmute,  we  trace  the  action  of 
his  unique,  incommunicable  faculty,  that  strange,  mystic- 
al sense  of  a  life  in  natural  things,  and  of  man's  life 
as  a  part  of  nature,  drawing  strength  and  color  and 
character  from  local  influences,  from  the  hills  and 
streams,  and  from  natural  sights  and  sounds.  Well! 
that  is  the  virtue,  the  active  principle  in  Wordsworth's 
poetry;  and  then  the  function  of  the  critic  of  Words- 
worth is  to  follow  up  that  active  principle,  to  disengage 
it,  to  mark  the  degree  in  which  it  penetrates  his  verse. 

The  subjects  of  the  following  studies  are  taken  from 
the  history  of  the  Renaissance,  and  touch  what  I  think 
tiie  chief  points  in  that  complex,  many-sided  movement. 
I  have  explained  in  the  first  of  them  what  I  understand 
by  the  word,  giving  it  a  much  wider  scope  than  was 
intended  by  those  who  originally  used  it  to  denote  that 
revival  of  classical  antiquity  in  the  fifteenth  century 
which  was  only  one  of  many  results  of  a  general  excite- 
ment and  enlightening  of  the  human  mind,  but  of  whicl 
the  great  aim  and  achievements  of  what,  as  Christian 
art,  is  often  falsely  opposed  to  the  Renaissance,  were 
another  result.    This  outbreak  of  the  human  spirit  may 


PREFACE 


xxix 


be  traced  far  into  the  middle  age  itself,  with  its  motives 
already  clearly  pronounced,  the  care  for  physical  beauty, 
the  worship  of  the  body,  the  breaking*  down  of  those 
limits  which  the  religious  system  of  the  middle  age  im- 
posed on  the  heart  and  the  imagination.  I  have  taken 
as  an  example  of  this  movement,  this  earlier  Renais- 
sance within  the  middle  age  itself,  and  as  an  expression 
of  its  qualities,  two  little  compositions  in  early  French; 
not  because  they  constitute  the  best  possible  expression 
of  them,  but  because  they  help  the  unity  of  my  series, 
inasmuch  as  the  Renaissance  ends  also  in  France,  in 
French  poetry,  in  a  phase  of  which  the  writings  of 
Joachim  du  Bellay  are  in  many  ways  the  most  perfect 
illustration.  The  Renaissance,  in  truth,  put  forth  in 
France  an  aftermath,  a  wonderful  later  growth,  the 
products  of  which  have  to  the  full  that  subtle  and  deli- 
cate sweetness  which  belongs  to  a  refined  and  comely 
decadence,  just  as  its  earliest  phases  have  the  freshness 
which  belongs  to  all  periods  of  growth  in  art,  the  charm 
of  asdesis,  of  the  austere  and  serious  girding  of  the 
loins  in  youth. 

But  it  is  in  Italy,  in  the  fifteenth  century,  that  the 
interest  of  the  Renaissance  mainly  lies, — in  that  solemn 
fifteenth  century  which  can  hardly  be  studied  too  much, 
not  merely  for  its  positive  results  in  the  things  of  the 
intellect  and  the  imagination,  its  concrete  works  of  art, 
ks  special  and  prominent  personalities,  with  their  pro- 
found aesthetic  charm,  but  for  its  general  spirit  and 
character,  for  the  ethical  qualities  of  which  it  is  a  con- 
summate type. 

The  various  forms  of  intellectual  activity  which  to- 
gether make  up  the  culture  of  an  age,  move  for  the  most 


XXX 


PREFACE 


part  from  different  starting-points,  and  by  unconnected 
roads.  As  products  of  the  same  generation  they  par- 
take indeed  of  a  common  character,  and  unconsciously 
illustrate  each  other;  but  of  the  producers  themselves, 
each  group  is  solitary,  gaining  what  advantage  or  dis- 
advantage there  may  be  in  intellectual  isolation.  Art 
and  poetry,  philosophy  and  the  religious  life,  and  that 
other  life  of  refined  pleasure  and  action  in  the  conspicu- 
ous places  of  the  world,  are  each  of  them  confined  to 
its  own  circle  of  ideas,  and  those  who  prosecute  either 
of  them  are  generally  little  curious  of  the  thoughts  of 
others.  There  come,  however,  from  time  to  time,  eras 
of  more  favorable  conditions,  in  which  the  thoughts  of 
men  draw  nearer  together  than  is  their  wont,  and  the 
many  interests  of  the  intellectual  world  combine  in  one 
complete  type  of  general  culture.  The  fifteenth  century 
in  Italy  is  one  of  these  happier  eras,  and  what  is  some- 
times said  of  the  age  of  Pericles  is  true  of  that  of 
Lorenzo: — it  is'  an  age  productive  in  personalities, 
many-sided,  centralised,  complete.  Here,  artists  and 
philosophers  and  those  whom  the  action  of  the  world 
has  elevated  and  made  keen,  do  not  live  in  isolation,  but 
breathe  a  common  air,  and  catch  light  and  heat  from 
each  other's  thoughts.  There  is  a  spirit  of  general  eleva- 
tion and  enlightenment  in  which  all  alike  communicate. 
The  unity  of  this  spirit  gives  unity  to  all  the  various 
products  of  the  Renaissance;  and  it  is  to  this  intimate 
alliance  with  mind,  this  participation  in  the  best  thoughts 
which  that  age  produced,  that  the  art  of  Italy  in  the 
fifteenth  century  owes  much  of  its  grave  dignity  and 
influence. 

I  have  added  an  essay  on  Winckelmann,  as  not  in- 


PREFACE 


xxxi 


congruous  with  the  studies  which  precede  it,  because 
Winckelmann,  coming  in  the  eighteenth  century,  really 
belongs  in  spirit  to  an  earlier  age.  By  his  enthusiasm 
for  the  things  of  the  intellect  and  the  imagination  for 
their  own  sake,  by  his  Hellenism,  his  life-long  struggle 
to  attain  to  the  Greek  spirit,  he  is  in  sympathy  with  the 
humanists  of  a  previous  century.  He  is  the  last  fruit 
of  the  Renaissance,  and  explains  in  a  striking  way  its 
motive  and  tendencies. 

1873- 


Yet  shall  ye  be  as  the  wings  of  a  dove. 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


TWO  EARLY  FRENCH  STORIES 


The  history  of  the  Renaissance  ends  in  France,  and 
carries  us  away  from  Italy  to  the  beautiful  cities  of  the 
country  of  the  Loire.  But  it  was  in  France  also,  in  a 
very  important  sense,  that  the  Renaissance  had  begun. 
French  writers,  who  are  fond  of  connecting  the  crea- 
tions of  Italian  genius  with  a  French  origin,  who  tell 
us  how  Saint  Francis  of  Assisi  took  not  his  name  only, 
but  all  those  notions  of  chivalry  and  romantic  love 
which  so  deeply  penetrated  his  thoughts,  from  a  French 
source,  how  Boccaccio  borrowed  the  outlines  of  his 
stories  from  the  old  French  fabliaux,  and  how  Dante 
himself  expressly  connects  the  origin  of  the  art  of  minia- 
ture-painting with  the  city  of  Paris,  have  often  dwelt 
on  this  notion  of  a  Renaissance  in  the  end  of  the  twelfth 
and  the  beginning  of  the  thirteenth  century,  a  Renais- 
sance within  the  limits  of  the  middle  age  itself — a  bril- 
liant, but  in  part  abortive  effort  to  do  for  human  life 
and  the  human  mind  what  was  afterwards  done  in  the 
fifteenth.  The  word  Renaissance,  indeed,  is  now  gener- 
ally used  to  denote  not  merely  the  revival  of  classical 
antiquity  which  took  place  in  the  fifteenth  century,  and 
to  which  the  word  was  first  applied,  but  a  whole  com- 
plex movement,  of  which  that  revival  of  classical  an- 
tiquity was  but  one  element  or  symptom.  For  us  the 
Renaissance  is  the  name  of  a  many-sided  but  yet  united 


2 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


movement,  in  which  the  love  of  the  things  of  the  intel- 
lect and  the  imagination  for  their  own  sake,  the  desire 
for  a  more  liberal  and  comely  way  of  conceiving  life, 
make  themselves  felt,  urging  those  who  experience  this 
desire  to  search  out  first  one  and  then  another  means  of 
intellectual  or  imaginative  enjoyment,  and  directing  them 
not  only  to  the  discovery  of  old  and  forgotten  sources 
of  this  enjoyment,  but  to  the  divination  of  fresh  sources 
thereof — new  experiences,  new  subjects  of  poetry,  new 
forms  of  art.  Of  such  feeling  there  was  a  great  out- 
break in  the  end  of  the  twelfth  and  the  beginning  of  the 
following  century.  Here  and  there,  under  rare  and 
happy  conditions,  in  Pointed  architecture,  in  the  doc- 
trines of  romantic  love,  in  the  poetry  of  Provence,  the 
rude  strength  of  the  middle  age  turns  to  sweetness ;  and 
the  taste  for  sweetness  generated  there  becomes  the  seed 
of  the  classical  revival  in  it,  prompting  it  constantly  to 
seek  after  the  springs  of  perfect  sweetness  in  the  Hel- 
lenic world.  And  coming  after  a  long  period  in  which 
this  instinct  had  been  crushed,  that  true  "dark  age,"  in 
which  so  many  sources  of  intellectual  and  imaginative 
enjoyment  had  actually  disappeared,  this  outbreak  is 
rightly  called  a  Renaissance,  a  revival. 

Theories  which  bring  into  connection  with  each  other 
modes  of  thought  and  feeling,  periods  of  taste,  forms  of 
art  and  poetry,  which  the  narrowness  of  men's  minds 
constantly  tends  to  oppose  to  each  other,  have  a  great 
stimulus  for  the  intellect,  and  are  almost  always  worth 
understanding.  It  is  so  with  this  theory  of  a  Renais- 
sance within  the  middle  age,  which  seeks  to  establish  a 
continuity  between  the  most  characteristic  work  of  that 
period,  the  sculpture  of  Chartres,  the  windows  of  Le 


TWO  EARLY  FRENCH  STORIES  3 


Mans,  and  the  work  of  the  later  Renaissance,  the  work 
of  Jean  Cousin  and  Germain  Pilon,  thus  healing  that 
rupture  between  the  middle  age  and  the  Renaissance 
which  has  so  often  been  exaggerated.  But  it  is  not  so 
much  the  ecclesiastical  art  of  the  middle  age,  its  sculp- 
ture and  painting — work  certainly  done  in  a  great  meas- 
ure for  pleasure's  sake,  in  which  even  a  secular,  a  rebel- 
lious spirit  often  betrays  itself — but  rather  its  profane 
poetry,  the  poetry  of  Provence,  and  the  magnificent 
after-growth  of  that  poetry  in  Italy  and  France,  which 
those  French  writers  have  in  view  when  they  speak  of 
this  medieval  Renaissance.  In  that  poetry,  earthly  pas- 
sion, with  its  intimacy,  its  freedom,  its  variety — the  lib- 
erty of  the  heart — makes  itself  felt;  and  the  name  of 
Abelard,  the  great  scholar  and  the  great  lover,  connects 
the  expression  of  this  liberty  of  heart  with  the  free  play 
of  human  intelligence  around  all  subjects  presented  to 
it,  with  the  liberty  of  the  intellect,  as  that  age  under- 
stood it. 

Every  one  knows  the  legend  of  Abelard,  a  legend 
hardly  less  passionate,  certainly  not  less  characteristic 
of  the  middle  age,  than  the  legend  of  Tannhauser;  how 
the  famous  and  comely  clerk,  in  whom  Wisdom  her- 
self, self-possessed,  pleasant,  and  discreet,  seemed  to  sit 
enthroned,  came  to  live  in  the  house  of  a  canon  of  the 
church  of  Notre-Dame,  where  dwelt  a  girl,  Heloise,  be- 
lieved to  be  the  old  priest's  orphan  niece;  how  the  old 
priest  had  testified  his  love  for  her  by  giving  her  an 
education  then  unrivalled,  so  that  rumor  asserted  that, 
through  the  knowledge  of  languages,  enabling  her  to 
penetrate  into  the  mysteries  of  the  older  world,  she  had 
become  a  sorceress,  like  the  Celtic  druidesses;  and  how 


4 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


as  Abelard  and  Heloise  sat  together  at  home  there,  to 
refine  a  little  further  on  the  nature  of  abstract  ideas, 
"Love  made  himself  of  the  party  with  them.,,  You 
conceive  the  temptations  of  the  scholar,  who,  in  such 
dreamy  tranquillity,  amid  the  bright  and  busy  spectacle 
of  the  "Island,"  lived  in  a  world  of  something  like 
shadows;  and  that  for  one  who  knew  so  well  how  to 
assign  its  exact  value  to  every  abstract  thought,  those 
restraints  which  lie  on  the  consciences  of  other  men 
had  been  relaxed.  It  appears  that  he  composed  many 
verses  in  the  vulgar  tongue :  already  the  young  men  sang 
them  on  the  quay  below  the  house.  Those  songs,  says 
M.  de  Remusat,  were  probably  in  the  taste  of  the 
Tronveres,  "of  whom  he  was  one  of  the  first  in  date, 
or,  so  to  speak,  the  predecessor."  It  is  the  same  spirit 
which  has  molded  the  famous  "letters,"  written  in  the 
quaint  Latin  of  the  middle  age. 

At  the  foot  of  that  early  Gothic  tower,  which  the 
next  generation  raised  to  grace  the  precincts  of  Abe- 
lard's  school,  on  the  "Mountain  of  Saint  Genevieve," 
the  historian  Michelet  sees  in  thought  "a  terrible  assem- 
bly; not  the  hearers  of  Abelard  alone,  fifty  bishops, 
twenty  cardinals,  two  popes,  the  whole  body  of  scho- 
lastic philosophy;  not  only  the  learned  Heloise,  the 
teaching  of  languages,  and  the  Renaissance ;  but  Arnold 
of  Brescia — that  is  to  say,  the  revolution."  And  so  from 
the  rooms  of  this  shadowy  house  by  the  Seine  side  we 
see  that  spirit  going  abroad,  with  its  qualities  already 
well  defined,  its  intimacy,  its  languid  sweetness,  its  re- 
bellion, its  subtle  skill  in  dividing  the  elements  of  human 
passion,  its  care  for  physical  beauty,  its  worship  of  the 


TWO  EARLY  FRENCH  STORIES  5 


body,  which  penetrated  the  early  literature  of  Italy,  and 
finds  an  echo  even  in  Dante. 

That  Abelard  is  not  mentioned  in  the  Divine  Comedy 
may  appear  a  singular  omission  to  the  reader  of  Dante, 
who  seems  to  have  inwoven  into  the  texture  of  his  work 
whatever  had  impressed  him  as  either  effective  in  color 
or  spiritually  significant  among  the  recorded  incidents 
of  actual  life.  Nowhere  in  his  great  poem  do  we  find 
the  name,  nor  so  much  as  an  allusion  to  the  story  of 
one  who  had  left  so  deep  a  mark  on  the  philosophy  of 
which  Dante  was  an  eager  student,  of  whom  in  the 
Latin  Quarter,  and  from  the  lips  of  scholar  or  teacher 
in  the  University  of  Paris,  during  his  sojourn  among 
them,  he  can  hardly  have  failed  to  hear.  We  can  only 
suppose  that  he  had  indeed  considered  the  story  and  the 
man,  and  abstained  from  passing  judgment  as  to  his 
place  in  the  scheme  of  "eternal  justice."  v 

In  the  famous  legend  of  Tannhauser,  the  erring 
knight  makes  his  way  to  Rome,  to  seek  absolution  at 
the  centre  of  Christian  religion.  "So  soon,"  thought  and 
said  the  Pope,  "as  the  staff  in  his  hand  should  bud  and 
blossom,  so  soon  might  the  soul  of  Tannhauser  be  savedfc 
and  no  sooner" ;  and  it  came  to  pass  not  long  after  that 
the  dry  wood  of  a  staff  which  the  Pope  had  carried  in 
his  hand  was  covered  with  leaves  and  flowers.  So,  in 
the  cloister  of  Godstow,  a  petrified  tree  was  shown  of 
which  the  nuns  told  that  the  fair  Rosamond,  who  had 
died  among  them,  had  declared  that,  the  tree  being  then 
alive  and  green,  it  would  be  changed  into  stone  at  the 
hour  of  her  salvation.  When  Abelard  died,  like  Tann- 
hauser, he  was  on  his  way  to  Rome.  What  might  have 
happened  had  he  reached  his  journey's  end  is  uncertain; 


6 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


and  it  is  in  this  uncertain  twilight  that  his  relation  to 
the  general  beliefs  of  his  age  has  always  remained.  In 
this,  as  in  other  things,  he  prefigures  the  character  of 
the  Renaissance,  that  movement  in  which,  in  various 
ways,  the  human  mind  wins  for  itself  a  new  kingdom 
of  feeling  and  sensation  and  thought,  not  opposed  to 
but  only  beyond  and  independent  of  the  spiritual  sys- 
tem then  actually  realised.  The  opposition  into  which 
Abelard  is  thrown,  which  gives  its  color  to  his  career, 
which  breaks  his  soul  to  pieces,  is  a  no  less  subtle  op- 
position than  that  between  the  merely  professional,  offi- 
cial, hireling  ministers  of  that  system,  with  their  ig- 
norant worship  of  system  for  its  own  sake,  and  the  true 
child  of  light,  the  humanist,  with  reason  and  heart  and 
senses  quick,  while  theirs  were  almost  dead.  He  reaches 
out  towards,  he  attains,  modes  of  ideal  living,  beyond 
the  prescribed  limits  of  that  system,  though  in  essential 
germ,  it  may  be,  contained  within  it.  As  always  hap- 
pens, the  adherents  of  the  poorer  and  narrower  culture 
had  no  sympathy  with,  because  no  understanding  of,  a 
culture  richer  and  more  ample  than  their  own.  After 
the  discovery  of  wheat  they  would  still  live  upon  acorns 
— apres  V invention  du  ble  voulaient  encore  vivre  du 
gland;  and  would  hear  of  no  service  to  the  higher  needs 
of  humanity  with  instruments  not  of  their  forging. 

But  the  human  spirit,  bold  through  those  needs,  was 
too  strong  for  them.  Abelard  and  Heloise  write  their 
letters — letters  with  a  wonderful  outpouring  of  soul — 
in  medieval  Latin;  and  Abelard,  though  he  composes 
songs  in  the  vulgar  tongue,  writes  also  in  Latin  those 
treatises  in  which  he  tries  to  find  a  ground  of  reality 
below  the  abstractions  of  philosophy,  as  one  bent  on 


TWO  EARLY  FRENCH  STORIES  7 

trying  all  things  by  their  congruity  with  human  experi- 
ence, who  had  felt  the  hand  of  Helo'ise,  and  looked  into 
her  eyes,  and  tested  the  resources  of  humanity  in  her 
great  and  energetic  nature.  Yet  it  is  only  a  little  later, 
early  in  the  thirteenth  century,  that  French  prose  ro- 
mance begins;  and  in  one  of  the  pretty  volumes  of  the 
Bibliotheque  Elzevirienne  some  of  the  most  striking 
fragments  of  it  may  be  found,  edited  with  much  intelli- 
gence. In  one  of  these  thirteenth-century  stories,  Li 
Amitiez  de  Ami  et  Amile,  that  free  play  of  human  af- 
fection, of  the  claims  of  which  Abelard's  story  is  an 
assertion,  makes  itself  felt  in  the  incidents  of  a  great 
friendship,  a  friendship  pure  and  generous,  pushed  to  a 
sort  of  passionate  exaltation,  and  more  than  faithful 
unto  death.  Such  comradeship,  though  instances  of  it 
are  to  be  found  everywhere,  is  still  especially  a  classical 
motive;  Chaucer  expressing  the  sentiment  of  it  so 
strongly  in  an  antique  tale,  that  one  knows  not  whether 
the  love  of  both  Palamon  and  Arcite  for  Emelya,  or  of 
those  two  for  each  other,  is  the  chief er  subject  of  the 
Knight's  Tale — 

He  cast  his  eyen  upon  Emelya, 

And  therewithal  he  bleynte  and  cried,  ah! 

As  that  he  stongen  were  unto  the  herte. 

What  reader  does  not  refer  something  of  the  bitterness 
of  that  cry  to  the  spoiling,  already  foreseen,  of  the  fair 
friendship,  which  had  made  the  prison  of  the  two  lads 
sweet  hitherto  with  its  daily  offices? 

The  friendship  of  Amis  and  Amile  is  deepened  by 
the  romantic  circumstance  of  an  entire  personal  resem- 
blance between  the  two  heroes,  through  which  they  pass 


8 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


for  each  other  again  and  again,  and  thereby  into  many 
strange  adventures;  that  curious  interest  of  the  Doppel- 
ganger,  which  begins  among  the  stars  with  the  Dioscuri, 
being  entwined  in  and  out  through  all  the  incidents  of 
the  story,  like  an  outward  token  of  the  inward  similitude 
of  their  souls.  With  this,  again,  is  connected,  like  a 
second  reflection  of  that  inward  similitude,  the  conceit 
of  two  marvelously  beautiful  cups,  also  exactly  like  each 
other — children's  cups,  of  wood,  but  adorned  with  gold 
and  precious  stones.  These  two  cups,  which  by  their 
resemblance  help  to  bring  the  friends  together  at  critical 
moments,  were  given  to  them  by  the  Pope,  when  he 
baptised  them  at  Rome,  whither  the  parents  had  taken 
them  for  that  purpose,  in  gratitude  for  their  birth.  They 
cross  and  recross  very  strangely  in  the  narrative,  serving 
the  two  heroes  almost  like  living  things,  and  with  that 
well-known  effect  of  a  beautiful  object,  kept  constantly 
before  the  eye  in  a  story  or  poem,  of  keeping  sensation 
well  awake,  and  giving  a  certain  air  of  refinement  to  all 
the  scenes  into  which  it  enters.  That  sense  of  fate, 
which  hangs  so  much  of  the  shaping  of  human  life  on 
trivial  objects,  like  Othello's  strawberry  handkerchief, 
is  thereby  heightened,  while  witness  is  borne  to  the  en- 
joyment of  beautiful  handiwork  by  primitive  people, 
their  simple  wonder  at  it,  so  that  they  give  it  an  oddly 
significant  place  among  the  factors  of  a  human  history. 

Amis  and  Amile,  then,  are  true  to  their  comradeship 
through  all  trials;  and  in  the  end  it  comes  to  pass  that 
at  a  moment  of  great  need  Amis  takes  the  place  of  Amile 
in  a  tournament  for  life  or  death.  "After  this  it  hap- 
pened that  a  leprosy  fell  upon  Amis,  so  that  his  wife 
would  not  approach  him,  and  wrought  to  strangle  him. 


TWO  EARLY  FRENCH  STORIES 


He  departed  therefore  from  his  home,  and  at  last  prayed 
his  servants  to  carry  him  to  the  house  of  Amile" ;  and 
it  is  in  what  follows  that  the  curious  strength  of  the  • 
piece  shows  itself : — 

"His  servants,  willing  to  do  as  he  commanded,  car- 
ried him  to  the  place  where  Amile  was ;  and  they  began 
to  sound  their  rattles  before  the  court  of  Amile's  house, 
as  lepers  are  accustomed  to  do.  And  when  Amile  heard 
the  noise  he  commanded  one  of  his  servants  to  carry 
meat  and  bread  to  the  sick  man,  and  the  cup  which  was 
given  to  him  at  Rome  filled  with  good  wine.  And  when 
the  servant  had  done  as  he  was  commanded,  he  returned 
and  said,  Sir,  if  I  had  not  thy  cup  in  my  hand,  I  should 
believe  that  the  cup  which  the  sick  man  has  was  thine, 
for  they  are  alike,  the  one  to  the  other,  in  height  and 
fashion.  And  Amile  said,  Go  quickly  and  bring  him  to 
me.  And  when  Amis  stood  before  his  comrade  Amile 
demanded  of  him  who  he  was,  and  how  he  had  gotten 
that  cup.  I  am  of  Briquain  le  Chastel,  answered  Amis, 
and  the  cup  was  given  to  me  by  the  Bishop  of  Rome, 
who  baptised  me.  And  when  Amile  heard  that,  he  knew 
that  it  was  his  comrade  Amis,  who  had  delivered  him 
from  death,  and  won  for  him  the  daughter  of  the  King 
of  France  to  be  his  wife.  And  straightway  he  fell  upon 
him,  and  began  weeping  greatly,  and  kissed  him.  And 
when  his  wife  heard  that,  she  ran  out  with  her  hair  in 
disarray,  weeping  and  distressed  exceedingly,  for  she 
remembered  that  it  was  he  who  had  slain  the  false 
Ardres.  And  thereupon  they  placed  him  in  a  fair  bed, 
and  said  to  him,  Abide  with  us  until  God's  will  be  ac- 
complished in  thee,  for  all  we  have  is  at  thy  service.  So 
he  and  the  two  servants  abode  with  them. 

"And  it  came  to  pass  one  night,  when  Amis  and  Amile 
lay  in  one  chamber  without  other  companions,  that  God 
sent  His  angel  Raphael  to  Amis,  who  said  to  him,  Amis, 
art  thou  asleep?    And  he,  supposing  that  Amile  had 


IO 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


called  him,  answered  and  said,  I  am  not  asleep,  fair 
comrade!  And  the  angel  said  to  him,  Thou  hast  an- 
.  swered  well,  for  thou  art  the  comrade  of  the  heavenly 
citizens. — I  am  Raphael,  the  angel  of  our  Lord,  and  am 
come  to  tell  thee  how  thou  mayest  be  healed;  for  thy 
prayers  are  heard.  Thou  shalt  bid  Amile,  thy  comrade, 
that  he  slay  his  two  children  and  wash  thee  in  their 
blood,  and  so  thy  body  shall  be  made  whole.  And  Amis 
said  to  him,  Let  not  this  thing  be,  that  my  comrade 
should  become  a  murderer  for  my  sake.  But  the  angel 
said,  It  is  convenient  that  he  do  this.  And  thereupon 
the  angel  departed. 

"And  Amile  also,  as  if  in  sleep,  heard  those  words; 
and  he  awoke  and  said,  Who  is  it,  my  comrade,  that 
hath  spoken  with  thee?  And  Amis  answered,  No  man; 
only  I  have  prayed  to  our  Lord,  as  I  am  accustomed. 
And  Amile  said,  Not  so !  but  some  one  hath  spoken  with 
thee.  Then  he  arose  and  went  to  the  door  of  the  cham- 
ber; and  finding  it  shut  he  said,  Tell  me,  my  brother, 
who  it  was  said  those  words  to  thee  to-night.  And 
Amis  began  to  weep  greatly,  and  told  him  that  it  was 
Raphael,  the  angel  of  the  Lord,  who  had  said  to  him, 
Amis,  our  Lord  commands  thee  that  thou  bid  Amile 
slay  his  two  children,  and  wash  thee  in  their  blood,  and 
so  thou  shalt  be  healed  of  thy  leprosy.  And  Amile  was 
greatly  disturbed  at  those  words,  and  said,  I  would  have 
given  to  thee  my  man-servants  and  my  maid-servants 
and  all  my  goods,  and  thou  feignest  that  an  angel  hath 
spoken  to  thee  that  I  should  slay  my  two  children.  And 
immediately  Amis  began  to  weep,  and  said,  I  know  that 
I  have  spoken  to  thee  a  terrible  thing,  but  constrained 
thereto ;  I  pray  thee  cast  me  not  away  from  the  shelter 
of  thy  house.  And  Amile  answered  that  what  he  had 
covenanted  with  him,  that  he  would  perform,  unto  the 
hour  of  his  death :  But  I  conjure  thee,  said  he,  by  the 
faith  which  there  is  between  me  and  thee,  and  by  our 
comradeship,  and  by  the  baptism  we  received  together 
at  Rome,  that  thou  tell  me  whether  it  was  man  or  angel 


TWO  EARLY  FRENCH  STORIES  ir 


said  that  to  thee.  And  Amis  answered  again,  So  truly 
as  an  angel  hath  spoken  to  me  this  night,  so  may  God 
deliver  me  from  my  infirmity! 

"Then  Amile  began  to  weep  in  secret,  and  thought 
within  himself :  If  this  man  was  ready  to  die  before 
the  king  for  me,  shall  I  not  for  him  slay  my  children? 
Shall  I  not  keep  faith  with  him  who  was  faithful  to  me 
even  unto  death?  And  Amile  tarried  no  longer,  but 
departed  to  the  chamber  of  his  wife,  and  bade  her  go 
hear  the  Sacred  Office.  And  he  took  a  sword,  and  went 
to  the  bed  where  the  children  were  lying,  and  found 
them  asleep.  And  he  lay  down  over  them  and  began  to 
weep  bitterly  and  said,  Hath  any  man  yet  heard  of  a 
father  who  of  his  own  will  slew  his  children  ?  Alas,  my 
children!  I  am  no  longer  your  father,  but  your  cruel 
murderer. 

"And  the  children  awoke  at  the  tears  of  their  father, 
which  fell  upon  them;  and  they  looked  up  into  his  face 
and  began  to  laugh,  And  as  they  were  of  the  age  of 
about  three  years,  he  said,  Your  laughing  will  be  turned 
into  tears,  for  your  innocent  blood  must  now  be  shed, 
and  therewith  he  cut  off  their  heads.  Then  he  laid  them 
back  in  the  bed,  and  put  the  heads  upon  the  bodies,  and 
covered  them  as  though  they  slept:  and  with  the  blood 
which  he  had  taken  he  washed  his  comrade,  and  said, 
Lord  Jesus  Christ!  who  hast  commanded  men  to  keep 
faith  on  earth,  and  didst  heal  the  leper  by  Thy  word! 
cleanse  now  my  comrade,  for  whose  love  I  have  shed 
the  blood  of  my  children. 

"Then  Amis  was  cleansed  of  his  leprosy.  And  Amile 
clothed  his  companion  in  his  best  robes;  and  as  they 
went  to  the  church  to  give  thanks,  the  bells,  by  the  will 
of  God,  rang  of  their  own  accord.  And  when  the  peo- 
ple of  the  city  heard  that,  they  ran  together  to  see  the 
marvel.  And  the  wife  of  Amile,  when  she  saw  Amis  and 
Amile  coming,  asked  which  of  the  twain  was  her  hus- 
band, and  said,  I  know  well  the  vesture  of  them  both, 
but  I  know  not  which  of  them  is  Amile.    And  Amile 


12 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


said  to  her,  I  am  Amile,  and  my  companion  is  Amis, 
who  is  healed  of  his  sickness.  And  she  was  full  of  won- 
der, and  desired  to  know  in  what  manner  he  was  healed. 
Give  thanks  to  our  Lord,  answered  Amile,  but  trouble  not 
thyself  as  to  the  manner  of  the  healing. 

"Now  neither  the  father  nor  the  mother  had  yet  en- 
tered where  the  children  were;  but  the  father  sighed 
heavily,  because  they  were  dead,  and  the  mother  asked 
for  them,  that  they  might  rejoice  together;  but  Amile 
said,  Dame!  let  the  children  sleep.  And  it  was  already 
the  hour  of  Tierce.  And  going  in  alone  to  the  children 
to  weep  over  them,  he  found  them  at  play  in  the  bed; 
only,  in  the  place  of  the  sword-cuts  about  their  throats 
was  as  it  were  a  thread  of  crimson.  And  he  took  them 
in  his  arms  and  carried  them  to  his  wife  and  said,  Re- 
joice greatly,  for  thy  children  whom  I  had  slain  by  the 
commandment  of  the  angel  are  alive,  and  by  their  blood 
is  Amis  healed." 

There,  as  I  said,  is  the  strength  of  the  old  French 
story.  For  the  Renaissance  has  not  only  the  sweetness 
which  it  derives  from  the  classical  world,  but  also  that 
curious  strength  of  which  there  are  great  resources  in 
the  true  middle  age.  And  as  I  have  illustrated  the  early 
strength  of  the  Renaissance  by  the  story  of  Amis  and 
Amile,  a  story  which  comes  from  the  North,  in  which 
a  certain  racy  Teutonic  flavor  is  perceptible,  so  I  shall 
illustrate  that  other  element,  its  early  sweetness,  a  lan- 
guid excess  of  sweetness  even,  by  another  story  printed 
in  the  same  volume  of  the  Bibliotheque  Elzevirienne ,  and 
of  about  the  same  date,  a  story  which  comes,  character- 
istically, from  the  South,  and  connects  itself  with  the 
literature  of  Provence. 

The  central  love-poetry  of  Provence,  the  poetry  of  the 
Tens  on  and  the  Aubade,  of  Bernard  de  Ventadour  and 


TWO  EARLY  FRENCH  STORIES  13 

Pierre  Vidal,  is  poetry  for  the  few,  for  the  elect  and 
peculiar  people  of  the  kingdom  of  sentiment.  But  below 
this  intenser  poetry  there  was  probably  a  wide  range  of 
literature,  less  serious  and  elevated,  reaching,  by  light- 
ness of  form  and  comparative  homeliness  of  interest, 
an  audience  which  the  concentrated  passion  of  those 
higher  lyrics  left  untouched.  This  literature  has  long 
since  perished,  or  lives  only  in  later  French  or  Italian 
versions.  One  such  version,  the  only  representative  of 
its  species,  M.  Fauriel  thought  he  detected  in  the  story 
of  Aucassin  and  Nicolette,  written  in  the  French  of  the 
latter  half  of  the  thirteenth  century,  and  preserved  in  a 
unique  manuscript,  in  the  national  library  of  Paris ;  and 
there  were  reasons  which  made  him  divine  for  it  a  still 
more  ancient  ancestry,  traces  in  it  of  an  Arabian  origin, 
as  in  a  leaf  lost  out  of  some  early  Arabian  Nights.1  The 
little  book  loses  none  of  its  interest  through  the  criticism 
which  finds  in  it  only  a  traditional  subject,  handed  on  by 
one  people  to  another;  for  after  passing  thus  from  hand 
to  hand,  its  outline  is  still  clear,  its  surface  untarnished; 
and,  like  many  other  stories,  books,  literary  and  artistic 
conceptions  of  the  middle  age,  it  has  come  to  have  in  this 
way  a  sort  of  personal  history,  almost  as  full  of  risk  and 
adventure  as  that  of  its  own  heroes.  The  writer  himself 

1  Recently,  Aucassin  and  Nicolette  has  been  edited  and 
translated  into  English,  with  much  graceful  scholarship,  by 
Mr.  F.  W.  Bourdillon.  Still  more  recently  we  have  had  a 
translation — a  poet's  translation — from  the  ingenious  and 
versatile  pen  of  Mr.  Andrew  Lang.  The  reader  should  con- 
sult also  the  chapter  on  "The  Out-door  Poetry/'  in  Ver- 
non Lee's  most  interesting  Euphorion;  being  Studies  of 
the  Antique  and  Mediaeval  in  the  Renaissance,  a  work 
abounding  in  knowledge  and  insight  on  the  subjects  of 
which  it  treats. 


14 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


calls  the  piece  a  cantefable,  a  tale  told  in  prose,  but  witH 
its  incidents  and  sentiment  helped  forward  by  songs,  in- 
serted at  irregular  intervals.  In  the  junctions  of  the 
story  itself  there  are  signs  of  roughness  and  want  of 
skill,  which  make  one  suspect  that  the  prose  was  only 
put  together  to  connect  a  series  of  songs — a  series  of 
songs  so  moving  and  attractive  that  people  wished  to 
heighten  and  dignify  their  effect  by  a  regular  framework 
or  setting.  Yet  the  songs  themselves  are  of  the  simplest 
kind,  not  rhymed  even,  but  only  imperfectly  assonant, 
stanzas  of  twenty  or  thirty  lines  apiece,  all  ending  witli 
a  similar  vowel  sound.  And  here,  as  elsewhere  in  that 
early  poetry,  much  of  the  interest  lies  in  the  spectacle 
of  the  formation  of  a  new  artistic  sense.  A  novel  art 
is  arising,  the  music  of  rhymed  poetry,  and  in  the  songs 
of  Aucassin  and  Nicolette,  which  seem  always  on  the 
point  of  passing  into  true  rhyme,  but  which  halt  some- 
how, and  can  never  quite  take  flight,  you  see  people  just 
growing  aware  of  the  elements  of  a  new  music  in  their 
possession,  and  anticipating  how  pleasant  such  music 
might  become. 

The  piece  was  probably  intended  to  be  recited  by  a 
company  of  trained  performers,  many  of  whom,  at  least 
for  the  lesser  parts,  were  probably  children.  The  songs 
are  introduced  by  the  rubric,  Or  se  cante  (ici  on  chante)  ; 
and  each  division  of  prose  by  the  rubric,  Or  dient  et  con- 
tent  et  fabloient  {ici  on  conte).  The  musical  notes  of 
a  portion  of  the  songs  have  been  preserved ;  and  some  of 
the  details  are  so  descriptive  that  they  suggested  to  M. 
Fauriel  the  notion  that  the  words  had  been  accompanied 
throughout  by  dramatic  action.  That  mixture  of  sim- 
plicity and  refinement  which  he  was  surprised  to  find  in 


/ 


TWO  EARLY  FRENCH  STORIES  15 


a  composition  of  the  thirteenth  century,  is  shown  some- 
times in  the  turn  given  to  some  passing  expression  or 
remark;  thus,  "the  Count  de  Garins  was  old  and  frail, 
his  time  was  over" — Li  quens  Garins  de  Beaucaire  estoit 
vix  et  frales;  si  avoit  son  tans  trespasse.  And  then,  all 
is  so  realised!  One  sees  the  ancient  forest,  with  its  dis- 
used roads  grown  deep  with  grass,  and  the  place  where 
seven  roads  meet — u  a  forkeut  set  cemin  qui  syen  vont 
par  le  pais;  we  hear  the  light-hearted  country  people 
calling  each  other  by  their  rustic  names,  and  putting  for- 
ward, as  their  spokesman,  one  among  them  who  is  more 
eloquent  and  ready  than  the  rest — li  un  qui  plus  fu  en* 
paries  des  autres;  for  the  little  book  has  its  burlesque 
element  also,  so  that  one  hears  the  faint,  far-off  laughter 
still.  Rough  as  it  is,  the  piece  certainly  possesses  this 
high  quality  of  poetry,  that  it  aims  at  a  purely  artistic 
effect.  Its  subject  is  a  great  sorrow,  yet  it  claims  to  be 
a  thing  of  joy  and  refreshment,  to  be  entertained  not 
for  its  matter  only,  but  chiefly  for  its  manner,  it  is 
cortois,  it  tells  us,  et  bien  assis. 

For  the  student  of  manners,  and  of  the  old  French 
language  and  literature,  it  has  much  interest  of  a  purely 
antiquarian  order.  To  say  of  an  ancient  literary  com- 
position that  it  has  an  antiquarian  interest,  often  means 
that  it  has  no  distinct  aesthetic  interest  for  the  reader  of 
to-day.  Antiquarianism,  by  a  purely  historical  effort,  by 
putting  its  object  in  perspective,  and  setting  the  reader 
in  a  certain  point  of  view,  from  which  what  gave  pleas- 
ure to  the  past  is  pleasurable  for  him  also,  may  ofterj 
add  greatly  to  the  charm  we  receive  from  ancient  litera- 
ture. But  the  first  condition  of  such  aid  must  be  a  real, 
direct,  aesthetic  charm  in  the  thing  itself.    Unless  it  has 


i6 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


that  charm,  unless  some  purely  artistic  quality  went  to 
its  original  making,  no  merely  antiquarian  effort  can 
ever  give  it  an  aesthetic  value,  or  make  it  a  proper  sub- 
ject of  aesthetic  criticism.  This  quality,  wherever  it  ex- 
ists, it  is  always  pleasant  to  define,  and  discriminate 
from  the  sort  of  borrowed  interest  which  an  old  play, 
or  an  old  story,  may  very  likely  acquire  through  a  true 
antiquarianism.  The  story  of  Aucassin  and  Nicolette 
has  something  of  this  quality.  Aucassin,  the  only  son  of 
Court  Garins  of  Beaucaire,  is  passionately  in  love  with 
Nicolette,  a  beautiful  girl  of  unknown  parentage,  bought 
of  the  Saracens,  whom  his  father  will  not  permit  him  to 
marry.  The  story  turns  on  the  adventures  of  these  two 
lovers,  until  at  the  end  of  the  piece  their  mutual  fidelity 
is  rewarded.  These  adventures  are  of  the  simplest  sort, 
adventures  which  seem  to  be  chosen  for  the  happy  oc- 
casion they  afford  of  keeping  the  eye  of  the  fancy,  per- 
haps the  outward  eye,  fixed  on  pleasant  objects,  a  gar- 
den, a  ruined  tower,  the  little  hut  of  flowers  which  Nico- 
lette constructs  in  the  forest  whither  she  escapes  from 
her  enemies,  as  a  token  to  Aucassin  that  she  has  passed 
that  way.  All  the  charm  of  the  piece  is  in  its  details,  in 
a  turn  of  peculiar  lightness  and  grace  given  to  the  situa- 
tions and  traits  of  sentiment,  especially  in  its  quaint 
fragments  of  early  French  prose. 

All  through  it  one  feels  the  influence  of  that  faint  air 
of  overwrought  delicacy,  almost  of  wantonness,  which 
was  so  strong  a  characteristic  of  the  poetry  of  the  Trou- 
badours. The  Troubadours  themselves  were  often  men 
of  great  rank;  they  wrote  for  an  exclusive  audience, 
people  of  much  leisure  and  great  refinement,  and  they 
came  to  value  a  type  of  personal  beauty  which  has  in  it 


TWO  EARLY  FRENCH  STORIES  17 


but  little  of  the  influence  of  the  open  air  and  sunshine. 
There  is  a  languid  Eastern  deliciousness  in  the  very 
scenery  of  the  story,  the  full-blown  roses,  the  chamber 
painted  in  some  mysterious  manner  where  Nicolette  is 
imprisoned,  the  cool  brown  marble,  the  almost  nameless 
colors,  the  odors  of  plucked  grass  and  flowers.  Nico- 
lette herself  well  becomes  this  scenery,  and  is  the  best 
illustration  of  the  quality  I  mean — the  beautiful,  weird, 
foreign  girl,  whom  the  shepherds  take  for  a  fay,  who  has 
the  knowledge  of  simples,  the  healing  and  beautifying 
qualities  of  leaves  and  flowers,  whose  skilful  touch  heals 
Aucassin's  sprained  shoulder,  so  that  he  suddenly  leaps 
from  the  ground;  the  mere  sight  of  whose  white  flesh, 
as  she  passed  the  place  where  he  lay,  healed  a  pilgrim 
stricken  with  sore  disease,  so  that  he  rose  up,  and  re- 
turned to  his  own  country.  With  this  girl  Aucassin  is 
so  deeply  in  love  that  he  forgets  all  knightly  duties.  At 
last  Nicolette  is  shut  up  to  get  her  out  of  his  way,  and 
perhaps  the  prettiest  passage  in  the  whole  piece  is  the 
fragment  of  prose  which  describes  her  escape: — 

"Aucassin  was  put  in  prison,  as  you  have  heard,  and 
Nicolette  remained  shut  up  in  her  chamber.  It  was 
summer-time,  in  the  month  of  May,  when  the  days  are 
warm  and  long  and  clear,  and  the  nights  coy  and  serene. 

"One  night  Nicolette,  lying  on  her  bed,  saw  the  moon 
shine  clear  through  the  little  window,  and  heard  the 
nightingale  sing  in  the  garden,  and  then  came  the  mem- 
ory of  Aucassin,  whom  she  so  much  loved.  She  thought 
of  the  Count  Garins  of  Beaucaire,  who  mortally  hated 
her,  and,  to  be  rid  of  her,  might  at  any  moment  cause 
her  to  be  burned  or  drowned.  She  perceived  that  the 
old  woman  who  kept  her  company  was  asleep ;  she  rose 
and  put  on  the  fairest  gown  she  had ;  she  took  the  bed- 


i8 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


clothes  and  the  towels,  and  knotted  them  together  like 
a  cord,  as  far  as  they  would  go.  Then  she  tied  the  end 
to  a  pillar  of  the  window,  and  let  herself  slip  down  quite 
softly  into  the  garden,  and  passed  straight  across  it,  to 
reach  the  town. 

"Her  hair  was  yellow  in  small  curls,  her  smiling  eyes 
blue-green,  her  face  clear  and  feat,  the  little  lips  very 
red,  the  teeth  small  and  white ;  and  the  daisies  which  she 
crushed  in  passing,  holding  her  skirt  high  behind  and 
before,  looked  dark  against  her  feet;  the  girl  was  so 
white ! 

"She  came  to  the  garden-gate  and  opened  it,  and 
walked  through  the  streets  of  Beaucaire,  keeping  on  the 
dark  side  of  the  way  to  be  out  of  the  light  of  the  moon, 
which  shone  quietly  in  the  sky.  She  walked  as  fast  as 
she  could,  until  she  came  to  the  tower  where  Aucassin 
was.  The  tower  was  set  about  with  pillars,  here  and 
there.  She  pressed  herself  against  one  of  the  pillars, 
wrapped  herself  closely  in  her  mantle,  and  putting  her 
face  to  a  chink  of  the  tower,  which  was  old  and  ruined, 
she  heard  Aucassin  crying  bitterly  within,  and  when 
she  had  listened  awhile  she  began  to  speak." 

But  scattered  up  and  down  through  this  lighter  matter, 
always  tinged  with  humor  and  often  passing  into  bur- 
lesque, which  makes  up  the  general  substance  of  the 
piece,  there  are  morsels  of  a  different  quality,  touches 
of  some  intenser  sentiment,  coming  it  would  seem  from 
the  profound  and  energetic  spirit  of  the  Provengal 
poetry  itself,  to  which  the  inspiration  of  the  book  has 
been  referred.  Let  me  gather  up  these  morsels  of 
deeper  color,  these  expressions  of  the  ideal  intensity  of 
love,  the  motive  which  really  unites  together  the  frag- 
ments of  the  little  composition.  Dante,  the  perfect 
flower  of  ideal  love,  has  recorded  how  the  tyranny  of 
that  "Lord  of  terrible  aspect"  became  actually  physical, 


TWO  EARLY  FRENCH  STORIES  19 


blinding  his  senses,  and  suspending  his  bodily  forces.  In 
this,  Dante  is  but  the  central  expression  and  type  of  ex- 
periences known  well  enough  to  the  initiated,  in  thai 
passionate  age.  Aucassin  represents  this  ideal  intensity 
of  passion — 

Aucassin,  li  biax,  li  blons, 
Li  gentix,   li  amorous; — 

the  slim,  tall,  debonair,  dansellon,  as  the  singers  call 
him,  with  his  curled  yellow  hair,  and  eyes  of  voir,  who 
faints  with  love,  as  Dante  fainted,  who  rides  all  day 
through  the  forest  in  search  of  Nicolette,  while  the 
thorns  tear  his  flesh,  so  that  one  might  have  traced  him 
by  the  blood  upon  the  grass,  and  who  weeps  at  eventide 
because  he  has  not  found  her,  who  has  the  malady  of 
his  love,  and  neglects  all  knightly  duties.  Once  he  is 
induced  to  put  himself  at  the  head  of  his  people,  that 
they,  seeing  him  before  them,  might  have  more  heart 
to  defend  themselves ;  then  a  song  relates  how  the  sweet, 
grave  figure  goes  forth  to  battle,  in  dainty,  tight-laced 
armor.  It  is  the  very  image  of  the  Provengal  lorve-god, 
no  longer  a  child,  but  grown  to  pensive  youth,  as  Pierre 
Vidal  met  him,  riding  on  a  white  horse,  fair  as  the 
morning,  his  vestment  embroidered  with  flowers.  He 
rode  on  through  the  gates  into  the  open  plain  beyond. 
But  as  he  went,  that  great  malady  of  his  love  came  upon 
him.  The  bridle  fell  from  his  hands ;  and  like  one  who 
sleeps  walking,  he  was  carried  on  into  the  midst  of  his 
enemies,  and  heard  them  talking  together  how  they 
might  most  conveniently  kill  him. 

One  of  the  strongest  characteristics  of  that  outbreak 
of  the  reason  and  the  imagination,  of  that  assertion  of 


20 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


the  liberty  of  the  heart,  in  the  middle  age,  which  I  have 
termed  a  medieval  Renaissance,  was  its  antinomianism, 
its  spirit  of  rebellion  and  revolt  against  the  moral  and 
religious  ideas  of  the  time.  In  their  search  after  the 
pleasures  of  the  senses  and  the  imagination,  in  their 
care  for  beauty,  in  their  worship  of  the  body,  people 
were  impelled  beyond  the  bounds  of  the  Christian  ideal; 
and*  their  love  became  sometimes  a  strange  idolatry,  a 
strange  rival  religion.  It  was  the  return  of  that  ancient 
Venus,  not  dead,  but  only  hidden  for  a  time  in  the 
caves  of  the  Venusberg,  of  those  old  pagan  gods  still 
going  to  and  fro  on  the  earth,  under  all  sorts  of  dis- 
guises. And  this  element  in  the  middle  age,  for  the 
most  part  ignored  by  those  writers  who  have  treated 
it  pre-eminently  as  the  "Age  of  Faith" — this  rebellious 
and  antinomian  element,  the  recognition  of  which  has 
made  the  delineation  of  the  middle  age  by  the  writers  of 
the  Romantic  school  in  France,  by  Victor  Hugo  for  in- 
stance in  Notre-Dame  de  Paris,  so  suggestive  and  ex- 
citing— is  found  alike  in  the  history  of  Abelard  and  the 
legend  of  Tannhauser.  More  and  more,  as  we  come  to 
mark  changes  and  distinctions  of  temper  in  what  is  often 
in  one  all-embracing  confusion  called  the  middle  age, 
that  rebellion,  that  sinister  claim  for  liberty  of  heart  and 
thought,  comes  to  the  surface.  The  Albigensian  move- 
ment, connected  so  strangely  with  the  history  of  Pro- 
vencal poetry,  is  deeply  tinged  with  it.  A  touch  of  it 
makes  the  Franciscan  order,  with  its  poetry,  its  mysti- 
cism, its  "illumination,"  from  the  point  of  view  of  re- 
ligious authority,  justly  suspect.  It  influences  the 
thoughts  of  those  obscure  prophetical  writers,  like  Joa- 
chim of  Flora,  strange  dreamers  in  a  world  of  flowery 


TWO  EARLY  FRENCH  STORIES  21 


rhetoric  of  that  third  and  final  dispensation  of  a  "spiri£ 
of  freedom/'  in  which  law  shall  have  passed  away.  Of 
this  spirit  Aucassin  and  Nicolette  contains  perhaps  the 
most  famous  expression :  it  is  the  answer  Aucassin  gives 
when  he  is  threatened  with  the  pains  of  hell,  if  he  makes 
Nicolette  his  mistress.  A  creature  wholly  of  affection 
and  the  senses,  he  sees  on  the  way  to  paradise  only  a 
feeble  and  worn-out  company  of  aged  priests,  "clinging 
day  and  night  to  the  chapel  altars/'  barefoot  or  in 
patched  sandals.  With  or  even  without  Nicolette,  "his 
sweet  mistress  whom  he  so  much  loves/'  he,  for  his  part, 
is  ready  to  start  on  the  way  to  hell,  along  with  "the  good 
scholars,"  as  he  says,  and  the  actors,  and  the  fine  horse- 
men dead  in  battle,  and  the  men  of  fashion,1  and  "the 
fair  courteous  ladies  who  had  two  or  three  chevaliers 
apiece  beside  their  own  true  lords,"  all  gay  with  music, 
in  their  gold,  and  silver,  and  beautiful  furs — "the  vair 
and  the  grey." 

But  in  the  House  Beautiful  the  saints,  too,  have  their 
place;  and  the  student  of  the  Renaissance  has  this  ad- 
vantage over  the  student  of  the  emancipation  of  the 
human  mind  in  the  Reformation,  or  the  French  Revolu- 
tion, that  in  tracing  the  footsteps  of  humanity  to  higher 
levels,  he  is  not  beset  at  every  turn  by  the  inflexibilities 
and  antagonisms  of  some  well-recognised  controversy, 
with  rigidly  defined  opposites,  exhausting  the  intelli- 
gence and  limiting  one's  sympathies.  The  opposition 
of  the  professional  defenders  of  a  mere  system  to  that 

xParage,  peerage: — which  came  to  signify  all  that  am- 
bitious youth  affected  most  on  the  outside  of  life,  in  that 
old  world  of  the  Troubadours,  with  whom  this  term  is  of 
frequent  recurrence. 


£2 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


more  sincere  and  generous  play  of  the  forces  of  human 
mind  and  character,  which  I  have  noted  as  the  secret 
of  Abelard's  struggle,  is,  indeed,  always  powerful.  But 
the  incompatibility  with  one  another  of  souls  really 
"fair**  is  not  essential;  and  within  the  enchanted  region 
of  the  Renaissance  one  needs  not  be  for  ever  on  one's 
guard.  Here  there  are  no  fixed  parties,  no  exclusions: 
all- breathes  of  that  unity  of  culture  in  which  "whatso- 
ever things  are  comely"  are  reconciled,  for  the  elevation 
and  adorning  of  our  spirits.  And  just  in  proportion  as 
those  who  took  part  in  the  Renaissance  become  cen- 
trally representative  of  it,  just  so  much  the  more  is  this 
condition  realised  in  them.  The  wicked  popes,  and  the 
loveless  tyrants,  who  from  time  to  time  became  its 
patrons,  or  mere  speculators  in  its  fortunes,  lend  them- 
selves easily  to  disputations,  and,  from  this  side  or  that, 
the  spirit  of  controversy  lays  just  hold  upon  them.  But 
the  painter  of  the  Last  Supper,  with  his  kindred,  lives 
in  a  land  where  controversy  has  no  breathing-place. 
They  refuse  to  be  classified.  In  the  story  of  Aucassin 
and  Nicolette,  in  the  literature  which  it  represents,  the 
note  of  defiance,  of  the  opposition  of  one  system  to  an- 
other, is  sometimes  harsh.  Let  me  conclude  then  with 
a  morsel  from  Amis  and  Amile,  in  which  the  harmony 
of  human  interests  is  still  entire.  For  the  story  of  the 
great  traditional  friendship,  in  which,  as  I  said,  the  lib- 
erty of  the  heart  makes  itself  felt,  seems,  as  we  have  it, 
to  have  been  written  by  a  monk — La  vie  des  saints  mar- 
tyrs  Amis  et  Amile.  It  was  not  till  the  end  of  the  seven- 
teenth century  that  their  names  were  finally  excluded 
from  the  martyrology ;  and  their  story  ends  with  this 


TWO  EARLY  FRENCH  STORIES  23 


monkish  miracle  of  earthly  comradeship,  more  than 
faithful  unto  death: — 

''For,  as  God  had  united  them  in  their  lives  in  one  ac- 
cord, so  they  were  not  divided  in  their  death,  falling 
together  side  by  side,  with  a  host  of  other  brave  men, 
in  battle  for  King  Charles  at  Mortara,  so  called  from 
that  great  slaughter.  And  the  bishops  gave  counsel  to 
the  king  and  queen  that  they  should  bury  the  dead,  and 
build  a  church  in  that  place;  and  their  counsel  pleased 
the  king  greatly.  And  there  were  built  two  churches, 
the  one  by  commandment  of  the  king  in  honor  of  Saint 
Oseige,  and  the  other  by  commandment  of  the  queen  in 
honor  of  Saint  Peter. 

"And  the  king  caused  the  two  chests  of  stone  to  be 
brought  in  the  which  the  bodies  of  Amis  and  Amile  lay ; 
and  Amile  was  carried  to  the  church  of  Saint  Peter,  and 
Amis  to  the  church  of  Saint  Oseige;  and  the  other 
corpses  were  buried,  some  in  one  place  and  some  in  the 
other.  But  lo !  next  morning,  the  body  of  Amile  in  his 
coffin  was  found  lying  in  the  church  of  Saint  Oseige, 
beside  the  coffin  of  Amis  his  comrade.  Behold  then  this 
wondrous  amity,  which  by  death  could  not  be  dissevered ! 

"This  miracle  God  did,  who  gave  to  His  disciples 
power  to  remove  mountains.  And  by  reason  of  this 
miracle  the  king  and  queen  remained  in  that  place  for  a 
space  of  thirty  days,  and  performed  the  offices  of  the 
dead  who  were  slain,  and  honored  the  said  churches 
with  great  gifts.  And  the  bishop  ordained  many  clerks 
to  serve  in  the  church  of  Saint  Oseige,  and  commanded 
them  that  they  should  guard  duly,  with  great  devotion, 
the  bodies  of  the  two  companions,  Amis  and  Amile." 


1872. 


PICO  DELLA  MIRANDOLA 

No  account  of  the  Renaissance  can  be  complete  with- 
out some  notice  of  the  attempt  made  by  certain  Italian 
scholars  of  the  fifteenth  century  to  reconcile  Christianity 
with  the  religion  of  ancient  Greece.  To  reconcile  forms 
of  sentiment  which  at  first  sight  seem  incompatible,  to 
adjust  the  various  products  of  the  human  mind  to  one 
another  in  one  many-sided  type  of  intellectual  culture, 
to  give  humanity,  for  heart  and  imagination  to  feed 
upon,  as  much  as  it  could  possibly  receive,  belonged  to 
the  generous  instincts  of  that  age.  An  earlier  and  sim- 
pler generation  had  seen  in  the  gods  of  Greece  so  many 
malignant  spirits,  the  defeated  but  still  living  centers  of 
the  religion  of  darkness,  struggling,  not  always  in  vain, 
against  the  kingdom  of  light.  Little  by  little,  as  the 
natural  charm  of  pagan  story  reasserted  itself  over  minds 
emerging  out  of  barbarism,  the  religious  significance 
which  had  once  belonged  to  it  was  lost  sight  of,  and  it 
came  to  be  regarded  as  the  subject  of  a  purely  artistic 
or  poetical  treatment.  But  it  was  inevitable  that  from 
time  to  time  minds  should  arise,  deeply  enough  im- 
pressed by  its  beauty  and  power  to  ask  themselves 
whether  the  religion  of  Greece  was  indeed  a  rival  of  the 
religion  of  Christ;  for  the  older  gods  had  rehabilitated 
themselves,  and  men's  allegiance  was  divided.  And  the 
fifteenth  century  was  an  impassioned  age,  so  ardent  and 
serious  in  its  pursuit  of  art  that  it  consecrated  every- 

24 


PICO  DELLA  MIRANDOLA  25 


thing  with  which  art  had  to  do  as  a  religious  object. 
The  restored  Greek  literature  had  made  it  familiar,  at 
least  in  Plato,  with  a  style  of  expression  concerning  the 
earlier  gods,  which  had  about  it  something  of  the  warmth 
and  unction  of  a  Christian  hymn.  It  was  too  familiar 
with  such  language  to  regard  mythology  as  a  mere  story ; 
and  it  was  too  serious  to  play  with  a  religion. 

"Let  me  briefly  remind  the  reader" — says  Heine,  in 
the  "Gods  in  Exile,"  an  essay  full  of  that  strange  blend- 
ing of  sentiment  which  is  characteristic  of  the  traditions 
of  the  middle  age  concerning  the  pagan  religions — "how 
the  gods  of  the  older  world,  at  the  time  of  the  definite 
triumph  of  Christianity,  that  is,  in  the  third  century, 
fell  into  painful  embarrassments,  which  greatly  resem- 
bled certain  tragical  situations  of  their  earlier  life.  They 
now  found  themselves  beset  by  the  same  troublesome 
necessities  to  which  they  had  once  before  been  exposed 
during  the  primitive  ages,  in  that  revolutionary  epoch 
when  the  Titans  broke  out  of  the  custody  of  Orcus,  and, 
piling  Pelion  on  Ossa,  scaled  Olympus.  Unfortunate, 
gods!  They  had  then  to  take  flight  ignominiously,  and 
hide  themselves  among  us  here  on  earth,  under  all  sorts 
of  disguises.  The  larger  number  betook  themselves  to 
Egypt,  where  for  greater  security  they  assumed  the 
forms  of  animals,  as  is  generally  known.  Just  in  the 
same  way,  they  had  to  take  flight  again,  and  seek  enter- 
tainment in  remote  hiding-places,  when  those  iconoclas- 
tic zealots,  the  black  brood  of  monks,  broke  down  all 
the  temples,  and  pursued  the  gods  with  fire  and  curses. 
Many  of  these  unfortunate  emigrants,  now  entirely  de- 
prived of  shelter  and  ambrosia,  must  needs  take  to  vul- 
gar handicrafts,  as  a  means  of  earning  their  bread.  Un- 


26 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


der  these  circumstances,  many  whose  sacred  groves  had 
been  confiscated,  let  themselves  out  for  hire  as  wood- 
cutters in  Germany,  and  were  forced  to  drink  beer  in- 
stead of  nectar.  Apollo  seems  to  have  been  content  to 
take  service  under  graziers,  and  as  he  had  once  kept  the 
cows  of  Admetus,  so  he  lived  now  as  a  shepherd  in 
Lower  Austria.  Here,  however,  having  become  sus- 
pected on  account  of  his  beautiful  singing,  he  was  recog- 
nised by  a  learned  monk  as  one  of  the  old  pagan  gods, 
and  handed  over  to  the  spiritual  tribunal.  On  the  rack 
he  confessed  that  he  was  the  god  Apollo ;  and  before  his 
execution  he  begged  that  he  might  be  suffered  to  play 
once  more  upon  the  lyre,  and  to  sing  a  song.  And  he 
played  so  touchingly,  and  sang  with  such  magic,  and  was 
withal  so  beautiful  in  form  and  feature,  that  all  the 
women  wept,  and  many  of  them  were  so  deeply  im- 
pressed that  they  shortly  afterwards  fell  sick.  Some 
time  afterwards  the  people  wished  to  drag  him  from 
the  grave  again,  that  a  stake  might  be  driven  through 
his  body,  in  the  belief  that  he  had  been  a  vampire,  and 
that  the  sick  women  would  by  this  means  recover.  But 
they  found  the  grave  empty/' 

The  Renaissance  of  the  fifteenth  century  was,  in  many 
things,  great  rather  by  what  it  designed  than  by  what  it 
achieved.  Much  which  it  aspired  to  do,  and  did  but 
imperfectly  or  mistakenly,  was  accomplished  in  what  is 
called  the  eclaircissement  of  the  eighteenth  century,  or 
in  our  own  generation;  and  what  really  belongs  to  the 
revival  of  the  fifteenth  century  is  but  the  leading  in- 
stinct, the  curiosity,  the  initiatory  idea.  It  is  so  with 
this  very  question  of  the  reconciliation  of  the  religion  of 
antiquity  with  the  religion  of  Christ.   A  modern  scholar 


PICO  DELLA  MIRANDOLA  27 


occupied  by  this  problem  might  observe  that  all  religions 
may  be  regarded  as  natural  products,  that,  at  least  in 
their  origin,  their  growth,  and  decay,  they  have  common 
laws,  and  are  not  to  be  isolated  from  the  other  move- 
ments of  the  human  mind  in  the  periods  in  which  they 
respectively  prevailed ;  that  they  arise  spontaneously  out 
of  the  human  mind,  as  expressions  of  the  varying  phases 
of  its  sentiment  concerning  the  unseen  world ;  that  every 
intellectual  product  must  be  judged  from  the  point  of 
view  of  the  age  and  the  people  in  which  it  was  produced. 
He  might  go  on  to  observe  that  each  has  contributed 
something  to  the  development  of  the  religious  sense,  and 
ranging  them  as  so  many  stages  in  the  gradual  educa- 
tion of  the  human  mind,  justify  the  existence  of  each. 
The  basis  of  the  reconciliation  of  the  religions  of  the 
world  would  thus  be  the  inexhaustible  activity  and  crea- 
tiveness  of  the  human  mind  itself,  in  which  all  religions 
alike  have  their  root,  and  In  which  all  alike  are  recon- 
ciled; just  as  the  fancies  of  childhood  and  the  thoughts 
of  old  age  meet  and  are  laid  to  rest,  in  the  experience  of 
the  individual. 

Far  different  was  the  method  followed  by  the  scholars 
of  the  fifteenth  century.  They  lacked  the  very  rudi* 
ments  of  the  historic  sense,  which,  by  an  imaginative 
act,  throws  itself  back  into  a  world  unlike  one's  own, 
and  estimates  every  intellectual  creation  in  its  connection 
with  the  age  from  which  it  proceeded.  They  had  no 
idea  of  development,  of  the  differences  of  ages,  of  the 
process  by  which  our  race  has  been  "educated."  In  their 
attempts  to  reconcile  the  religions  of  the  world,  they 
were  thus  thrown  back  upon  the  quicksand  of  allegorical 
interpretation.    The  religions  of  the  world  were  to  be 


28 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


reconciled,  not  as  successive  stages  in  a  regular  develop- 
ment of  the  religious  sense,  but  as  subsisting  side  by 
side,  and  substantially  in  agreement  with  one  another. 
And  here  the  first  necessity  was  to  misrepresent  the  lan- 
guage, the  conceptions,  the  sentiments,  it  was  proposed 
to  compare  and  reconcile.  Plato  and  Homer  must  be 
made  to  speak  agreeably  to  Moses.  Set  side  by  side, 
the  mere  surfaces  could  never  unite  in  any  harmony  of 
design.  Therefore  one  must  go  below  the  surface,  and 
bring  up  the  supposed  secondary,  or  still  more  remote 
meaning, — that  diviner  signification  held  in  reserve,  in 
recessu  divinius  aliquid,  latent  in  some  stray  touch  of 
Homer,  or  figure  of  speech  in  the  book  of  Moses. 

And  yet  as  a  curiosity  of  the  human  mind,  a  "mad- 
house-cell," if  you  will,  into  which  we  may  peep  for  a 
moment,  and  see  it  at  work  weaving  strange  fancies, 
the  allegorical  interpretation  of  the  fifteenth  century 
has  its  interest.  With  its  strange  web  of  imagery,  its 
quaint  conceits,  its  unexpected  combinations  and  subtle 
moralising,  it  is  an  element  in  the  local  color  of  a  great 
age.  It  illustrates  also  the  faith  of  that  age  in  all  oracles, 
its  desire  to  hear  all  voices,  its  generous  belief  that  noth- 
ing which  had  ever  interested  the  human  mind  could 
wholly  lose  its  vitality.  It  is  the  counterpart,  though 
certainly  the  feebler  counterpart,  of  that  practical  truce 
and  reconciliation  of  the  gods  of  Greece  with  the  Chris- 
tian religion,  which  is  seen  in  the  art  of  the  time.  And 
it  is  for  his  share  in  this  work,  and  because  his  own  story 
is  a  sort  of  analogue  or  visible  equivalent  to  the  expres- 
sion of  this  purpose  in  his  writings,  that  something  of  a 
general  interest  still  belongs  to  the  name  of  Pico  della 
Mirandola,  whose  life,  written  by  his  nephew  Francis, 


PICO  DELLA  MIRANDOLA  29 


seemed  worthy,  for  some  touch  of  sweetness  in  it,  to  be 
translated  out  of  the  original  Latin  by  Sir  Thomas  More, 
that  great  lover  of  Italian  culture,  among  whose  works 
the  life  of  Pico,  Earl  of  Mirandola,  and  a  great  lord  of 
Italy,  as  he  calls  him,  may  still  be  read,  in  its  quaint, 
antiquated  English. 

Marsilio  Ficino  has  told  us  how  Pico  came  to  Florence. 
It  was  the  very  day — some  day  probably  in  the  year  1482 
— on  which  Ficino  had  finished  his  famous  translation 
of  Plato  into  Latin,  the  work  to  which  he  had  been  dedi- 
cated from  childhood  by  Cosmo  de'  Medici,  in  further- 
ance of  his  desire  to  resuscitate  the  knowledge  of  Plato 
among  his  fellow-citizens.  Florence  indeed,  as  M. 
Renan  has  pointed  out,  had  always  had  an  affinity  for 
the  mystic  and  dreamy  philosophy  of  Plato,  while  the 
colder  and  more  practical  philosophy  of  Aristotle  had 
flourished  in  Padua,  and  other  cities  of  the  north;  and 
the  Florentines,  though  they  knew  perhaps  very  little 
about  him,  had  had  the  name  of  the  great  idealist  often 
on  their  lips.  To  increase  this  knowledge,  Cosmo  had 
founded  the  Platonic  academy,  with  periodical  discus- 
sions at  the  Villa  Careggi.  The  fall  of  Constantinople 
in  1453,  and  the  council  in  1438  for  the  reconciliation  of 
the  Greek  and  Latin  Churches,  had  brought  to  Florence 
many  a  needy  Greek  scholar.  And  now  the  work  was 
completed,  the  door  of  the  mystical  temple  lay  open  to 
all  who  could  construe  Latin,  and  the  scholar  rested  from 
his  labor;  when  there  was  introduced  into  his  study, 
where  a  lamp  burned  continually  before  the  bust  of 
Plato,  as  other  men  burned  lamps  before  their  favorite 
saints,  a  young  man  fresh  from  a  journey,  "of  feature 
and  shape  seemly  and  beauteous,  of  stature  goodly  and 


30 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


high,  of  flesh  tender  and  soft,  his  visage  lovely  and  fair, 
his  color  white,  intermingled  with  comely  reds,  his  eyes 
grey,  and  quick  of  look,  his  teeth  white  and  even,  his 
hair  yellow  and  abundant,"  and  trimmed  with  more  than 
the  usual  artifice  of  the  time. 

It  is  thus  that  Sir  Thomas  More  translates  the  words 
of  the  biographer  of  Pico,  who,  even  in  outward  form 
and  appearance,  seems  an  image  of  that  inward  har- 
mony and  completeness,  of  which  he  is  so  perfect  an 
example.  The  word  mystic  has  been  usually  derived 
from  a  Greek  word  which  signifies  to  shut,  as  if  one  shut 
one's  lips  brooding  on  what  cannot  be  uttered;  but  the 
Platonists  themselves  derive  it  rather  from  the  act  of 
shutting  the  eyes,  that  one  may  see  the  more,  inwardly. 
Perhaps  the  eyes  of  the  mystic  Ficino,  now  long  past 
the  midway  of  life,  had  come  to  be  thus  half-closed; 
but  when  a  young  man,  not  unlike  the  archangel  Raphael, 
as  the  Florentines  of  that  age  depicted  him  in  his  won- 
derful walk  with  Tobit,  or  Mercury,  as  he  might  have 
appeared  in  a  painting  by  Sandro  Botticelli  or  Piero  di 
Cosimo,  entered  his  chamber,  he  seems  to  have  thought 
there  was  something  not  wholly  earthly  about  him;  at 
least,  he  ever  afterwards  believed  that  it  was  not  with- 
out the  cooperation  of  the  stars  that  the  stranger  had 
arrived  on  that  day.  For  it  happened  that  they  fell  into 
a  conversation,  deeper  and  more  intimate  than  men 
usually  fall  into  at  first  sight.  During  this  conversation 
Ficino  formed  the  design  of  devoting  his  remaining 
years  to  the  translation  of  Plotinus,  that  new  Plato,  in 
whom  the  mystical  element  in  the  Platonic  philosophy 
had  been  v/orked  out  to  the  utmost  limit  of  vision  and 
ecstasy;  and  it  is  in  dedicating  this  translation  to  Lo- 


PICO  BELLA  MIRANDOLA  31 


renzo  de'  Medici  that  Ficino  has  recorded  these  inci- 
dents. 

It  was  after  many  wanderings,  wanderings  of  the  in- 
tellect as  well  as  physical  journeys,  that  Pico  came  to 
rest  at  Florence.  Born  in  1463,  he  was  then  about 
twenty  years  old.  He  was  called  Giovanni  at  baptism, 
Pico,  like  all  his  ancestors,  from  Picus,  nephew  of  the 
Emperor  Constantine,  from  whom  they  claimed  to  be 
descended,  and  Mirandola  from  the  place  of  his  birth, 
a  little  town  afterwards  part  of  the  duchy  of  Modena, 
of  which  small  territory  his  family  had  long  been  the 
feudal  lords.  Pico  was  the  youngest  of  the  family,  and 
his  mother,  delighting  in  his  wonderful  memory,  sent 
him  at  the  age  of  fourteen  to  the  famous  school  of  law 
at  Bologna.  From  the  first,  indeed,  she  seems  to  have 
had  some  presentiment  of  his  future  fame,  for,  with  a 
faith  in  omens  characteristic  of  her  time,  she  believed 
that  a  strange  circumstance  had  happened  at  the  time  of 
Pico's  birth — the  appearance  of  a  circular  flame  which 
suddenly  vanished  away,  on  the  wall  of  the  chamber 
where  she  lay.  He  remained  two  years  at  Bologna ;  and 
then,  with  an  inexhaustible,  unrivalled  thirst  for  knowl- 
edge, the  strange,  confused,  uncritical  learning  of  that 
age,  passed  through  the  principal  schools  of  Italy  and 
France,  penetrating,  as  he  thought,  into  the  secrets  of 
all  ancient  philosophies,  and  many  Eastern  languages. 
And  with  this  flood  of  erudition  came  the  generous  hope, 
so  often  disabused,  of  reconciling  the  philosophers  with 
one  another,  and  all  alike  with  the  Church.  At  last  he 
came  to  Rome.  There,  like  some  knight-errant  of  phi- 
losophy, he  offered  to  defend  nine  hundred  bold  para- 
doxes, drawn  from  the  most  opposite  sources,  against 


3* 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


all  comers.  But  the  pontifical  court  was  led  to  suspect 
the  orthodoxy  of  some  of  these  propositions,  and  even 
the  reading  of  the  book  which  contained  them  was  for- 
bidden by  the  Pope.  It  was  not  until  1493  that  Pico 
was  finally  absolved,  by  a  brief  of  Alexander  the  Sixth. 
Ten  years  before  that  date  he  had  arrived  at  Florence; 
an  early  instance  of  those  who,  after  following  the  vain 
hope  of  an  impossible  reconciliation  from  system  to  sys- 
tem, have  at  last  fallen  back  unsatisfied  on  the  simplici- 
ties of  their  childhood's  belief. 

The  oration  which  Pico  composed  for  the  opening  of 
this  philosophical  tournament  still  remains;  its  subject  is 
the  dignity  of  human  nature,  the  greatness  of  man.  In 
common  with  nearly  all  medieval  speculation,  much  of 
Pico's  writing  has  this  for  its  drift;  and  in  common 
also  with  it,  Pico's  theory  of  that  dignity  is  founded  on 
a  misconception  of  the  place  in  nature  both  of  the  earth 
and  of  man.  For  Pico  the  earth  is  the  center  of  the 
universe :  and  around  it,  as  a  fixed  and  motionless  point, 
the  sun  and  moon  and  stars  revolve,  like  diligent  serv- 
ants or  ministers.  And  in  the  midst  of  all  is  placed 
man,  nodus  et  vinculum  mundi,  the  bond  or  copula  of 
the  world,  and  the  "interpreter  of  nature" :  that  famous 
expression  of  Bacon's  really  belongs  to  Pico.  Tritum 
est  in  scholis,  he  says,  esse  hominem  minorem  mundum, 
in  quo  mixtum  ex  elementis  corpus  et  spiritus  coelestis 
et  plantarum  anima  vegetalis  et  brutorum  sensus  et  ratio 
et  angelica  mens  et  Dei  similitudo  conspicitur  — "It  is  a 
commonplace  of  the  schools  that  man  is  a  little  world, 
in  which  we  may  discern  a  body  mingled  of  earthly  ele- 
ments, and  ethereal  breath,  and  the  vegetable  life  of 
plants,  and  the  senses  of  the  lower  animals,  and  reason, 


PICO  DELLA  MIRANDOLA 


2nd  the  intelligence  of  angels,  and  a  likeness  to  God." 

A  commonplace  of  the  schools!  But  perhaps  it  had 
some  new  significance  and  authority,  when  men  heard 
jme  like  Pico  reiterate  it ;  and,  false  as  its  basis  was,  the 
theory  had  its  use.  For  this  high  dignity  of  man,  thus 
[bringing  the  dust  under  his  feet  into  sensible  communion 
with  the  thoughts  and  affections  of  the  angels,  was  sup- 
posed to  belong  to  him,  not  as  renewed  by  a  religious 
system,  but  by  his  own  natural  right.  The  proclamation 
of  it  was  a  counterpoise  to  the  increasing  tendency  of 
medieval  religion  to  depreciate  man's  nature,  to  sacrifice 
this  or  that  element  in  it,  to  make  it  ashamed  of  itself, 
to  keep  the  degrading  or  painful  accidents  of  it  always 
in  view.  It  helped  man  onward  to  that  reassertion  of 
himself,  that  rehabilitation  of  human  nature,  the  body, 
the  senses,  the  heart,  the  intelligence,  which  the  Renais- 
sance fulfils.  And  yet  to  read  a  page  of  one  of  Pico's 
forgotten  books  is  like  a  glance  into  one  of  those  ancient 
sepulchres,  upon  which  the  wanderer  in  classical  lands 
has  sometimes  stumbled,  with  the  old  disused  ornaments 
and  furniture  of  a  world  wholly  unlike  ours  still  fresh 
in  them.  That  whole  conception  of  nature  is  so  different 
from  our  own.  For  Pico  the  world  is  a  limited  place, 
bounded  by  actual  crystal  walls,  and  a  material  firma- 
ment; it  is  like  a  painted  toy,  like  that  map  or  system  of 
the  world,  held,  as  a  great  target  or  shield,  in  the  hands 
of  the  creative  Logos,  by  whom  the  Father  made  all 
things,  in  one  of  the  earlier  frescoes  of  the  Campo  Santo 
at  Pisa.  How  different  from  this  childish  dream  is  our 
own  conception  of  nature,  with  its  unlimited  space,  its 
innumerable  suns,  and  the  earth  but  a  mote  in  the  beam  ; 
how  different  the  strange  new  awe,  or  superstition,  witfr 


34 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


which  it  fills  our  minds!  'The  silence  of  those  infinite 
spaces,"  says  Pascal,  contemplating  a  starlight  night,  "the 
silence  of  those  infinite  spaces  terrifies  me" : — he  silence 
eternel  de  ces  es paces  infinis  m'effraie. 

He  was  already  almost  wearied  out  when  he  came  to 
Florence.  He  had  loved  much  and  been  beloved  by 
women,  "wandering  over  the  crooked  hills  of  delicious 
pleasure";  but  their  reign  over  him  was  over,  and  long 
before  Savonarola's  famous  "bonfire  of  vanities/'  he 
had  destroyed  those  love-songs  in  the  vulgar  tongue, 
which  would  have  been  so  great  a  relief  to  us,  after  the 
scholastic  prolixity  of  his  Latin  writings.  It  was  in  an- 
other spirit  that  he  composed  a  Platonic  commentary, 
the  only  work  of  his  in  Italian  which  has  come  down  to 
us,  on  the  "Song  of  Divine  Love" — secondo  la  mente  ed 
opinione  dei  Platonici — "according  to  the  mind  and 
opinion  of  the  Platonists,"  by  his  friend  Hieronymo 
Beniveni,  in  which,  with  an  ambitious  array  of  every 
sort  of  learning,  and  a  profusion  of  imagery  borrowed 
indifferently  from  the  astrologers,  the  Cabala,  and 
Homer,  and  Scripture,  and  Dionysius  the  Areopagite, 
he  attempts  to  define  the  stages  by  which  the  soul  passes 
from  the  earthly  to  the  unseen  beauty.  A  change,  in- 
deed, had  passed  over  him,  as  if  the  chilling  touch  of  the 
abstract  and  disembodied  beauty  Platonists  profess  to 
long  for  were  already  upon  him.  Some  sense  of  this, 
perhaps,  coupled  with  that  over-brightness  which  in  the 
popular  imagination  always  betokens  an  early  death, 
made  Camilla  Rucellai,  one  of  those  prophetic  women 
whom  the  preaching  of  Savonarola  had  raised  up  in 
Florence,  declare,  seeing  him  for  the  first  time,  that  he 
would  depart  in  the  time  of  lilies — prematurely,  that  is, 


PICO  DELLA  MIRANDOLA  35 


like  the  field-flowers  which  are  withered  by  the  scorch- 
ing sun  almost  as  soon  as  they  are  sprung  up.  He  now 
wrote  down  those  thoughts  on  the  religious  life  which 
Sir  Thomas  More  turned  into  English,  and  which  an- 
other English  translator  thought  worthy  to  be  added  to 
the  books  of  the  Imitation.  "It  is  not  hard  to  know 
God,  provided  one  will  not  force  one's  self  to  define 
Him" : — has  been  thought  a  great  saying  of  Joubert's. 
"Love  God,"  Pico  writes  to  Angelo  Politian,  "we  rather 
may,  than  either  know  Him,  or  by  speech  utter  Him. 
And  yet  had  men  liefer  by  knowledge  never  find  that 
which  they  seek,  than  by  love  possess  that  thing,  which 
also  without  love  were  in  vain  found." 

Yet  he  who  had  this  fine  touch  for  spiritual  things  did 
not — and  in  this  is  the  enduring  interest  of  his  story — 
even  after  his  conversion,  forget  the  old  gods.  He  is 
one  of  the  last  who  seriously  and  sincerely  entertained 
the  claim  on  men's  faith  of  the  pagan  religions;  he  is 
anxious  to  ascertain  the  true  significance  of  the  obscurest 
legend,  the  lightest  tradition  concerning  them.  WitH 
many  thoughts  and  many  influences  which  led  him  in 
that  direction,  he  did  not  become  a  monk;  only  he  be- 
came gentle  and  patient  in  disputation ;  retaining  "some- 
what of  the  old  plenty,  in  dainty  viand  and  silver  vessel," 
he  gave  over  the  greater  part  of  his  property  to  his 
friend,  the  mystical  poet  Beniveni,  to  be  spent  by  him 
in  works  of  charity,  chiefly  in  the  sweet  charity  of  pro- 
viding marriage-dowries  for  the  peasant  girls  of  Flor- 
ence. His  end  came  in  1494,  when,  amid  the  prayers  and 
sacraments  of  Savonarola,  he  died  of  fever,  on  the  very 
day  on  which  Charles  the  Eighth  entered  Florence,  the 
seventeenth  of  November,  yet  in  the  time  of  lilies — the 


36 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


lilies  of  the  shield  of  France,  as  the  people  now  said, 
remembering  Camilla's  prophecy.  He  was  buried  in  the 
conventual  church  of  Saint  Mark,  in  the  hood  and  white 
frock  of  the  Dominican  order. 

It  is  because  the  life  of  Pico,  thus  lying  down  to  rest 
in  the  Dominican  habit,  yet  amid  thoughts  of  the  older 
gods,  himself  like  one  of  those  comely  divinities,  recon- 
ciled indeed  to  the  new  religion,  but  still  with  a  tender- 
ness for  the  earlier  life,  and  desirous  literally  to  "bind 
the  ages  each  to  each  by  natural  piety" — it  is  because 
this  life  is  so  perfect  a  parallel  to  the  attempt  made  in 
his  writings  to  reconcile  Christianity  with  the  ideas  of 
paganism,  that  Pico,  in  spite  of  the  scholastic  character 
of  those  writings,  is  really  interesting.  Thus,  in  the 
Heptaplus,  or  Discourse  on  the  Seven  Days  of  the 
Creation,  he  endeavors  to  reconcile  the  accounts  which 
pagan  philosophy  had  given  of  the  origin  of  the  world 
with  the  account  given  in  the  books  of  Moses — the 
Timceus  of  Plato  with  the  book  of  Genesis.  The  Hepta- 
plus is  dedicated  to  Lorenzo  the  Magnificent,  whose  in- 
terest, the  preface  tells  us,  in  the  secret  wisdom  of  Moses 
is  well  known.  If  Moses  seems  in  his  writings  simple 
and  even  popular,  rather  than  either  a  philosopher  or  a 
theologian,  that  is  because  it  was  an  institution  with  the 
ancient  philosophers,  either  not  to  speak  of  divine  things 
at  all,  or  to  speak  of  them  dissemblingly :  hence  their 
doctrines  were  called  mysteries.  Taught  by  them,  Pytha- 
goras became  so  great  a  "master  of  silence,"  and  wrote 
almost  nothing,  thus  hiding  the  words  of  God  in  his 
heart,  and  speaking  wisdom  only  among  the  perfect.  In 
explaining  the  harmony  between  Plato  and  Moses,  Pico 
lays  hold  on  every  sort  of  figure  and  analogy,  on  the 


PICO  DELLA  MIRANDOLA  37 


double  meanings  of  words,  the  symbols  of  the  Jewish 
ritual,  the  secondary  meanings  of  obscure  stories  in  the 
later  Greek  mythologists.  Everywhere  there  is  an  un- 
broken system  of  correspondences.  Every  object  in  the 
terrestrial  world  is  an  analogue,  a  symbol  or  counter- 
part, of  some  higher  reality  in  the  starry  heavens,  and 
this  again  of  some  law  of  the  angelic  life  in  the  world 
beyond  the  stars.  There  is  the  element  of  fire  in  the 
material  world ;  the  sun  is  the  fire  of  heaven ;  and  in  the 
super-celestial  world  there  is  the  fire  of  the  seraphic  in- 
telligence. "But  behold  how  they  differ!  The  elemen- 
tary fire  burns,  the  heavenly  fire  vivifies,  the  super-celes- 
tial fire  loves.''  In  this  way,  every  natural  object,  every 
combination  of  natural  forces,  every  accident  in  the  lives 
of  men,  is  filled  with  higher  meanings.  Omens,  prophe- 
cies, supernatural  coincidences,  accompany  Pico  himself 
all  through  life.  There  are  oracles  in  every  tree  and 
mountain-top,  and  a  significance  in  every  accidental  com- 
bination of  the  events  of  life. 

This  constant  tendency  to  symbolism  and  imagery 
gives  Pico's  work  a  figured  style,  by  which  it  has  some 
real  resemblance  to  Plato's,  and  he  differs  from  other 
mystical  writers  of  his  time  by  a  genuine  desire  to  know 
his  authorities  at  first  hand.  He  reads  Plato  in  Greek, 
Moses  in  Hebrew,  and  by  this  his  work  really  belongs 
to  the  higher  culture.  Above  all,  we  have  a  constant 
sense  in  reading  him,  that  his  thoughts,  however  little 
their  positive  value  may  be,  are  connected  with  the  strings 
beneath  them  of  deep  and  passionate  emotion ;  and  when 
he  explains  the  grades  or  steps  by  which  the  soul  passes 
from  the  love  of  a  physical  object  to  the  love  of  unseen 
beauty,  and  unfolds  the  analogies  between  this  process 


38 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


and  other  movements  upward  of  human  thought,  there 
is  a  glow  and  vehemence  in  his  words  which  remind  one 
of  the  manner  in  which  his  own  brief  existence  flamed 
itself  away. 

I  said  that  the  Renaissance  of  the  fifteenth  century- 
was,  in  many  things,  great  rather  by  what  it  designed  or 
aspired  to  do,  than  by  what  it  actually  achieved.  It  re- 
mained for  a  later  age  to  conceive  the  true  method  of 
effecting  a  scientific  reconciliation  of  Christian  sentiment 
with  the  imagery,  the  legends,  the  theories  about  the 
world,  of  pagan  poetry  and  philosophy.  For  that  age 
the  only  possible  reconciliation  was  an  imaginative  one, 
and  resulted  from  the  efforts  of  artists,  trained  in  Chris- 
tian schools,  to  handle  pagan  subjects;  and  of  this  artist- 
ic reconciliation  work  like  Pico's  was  but  the  feebler 
counterpart.  Whatever  philosophers  had  to  say  on  one 
side  or  the  other,  whether  they  were  successful  or  not 
in  their  attempts  to  reconcile  the  old  to  the  new,  and  to 
justify  the  expenditure  of  so  much  care  and  thought  on 
the  dreams  of  a  dead  faith,  the  imagery  of  the  Greek 
religion,  the  direct  charm  of  its  story,  were  by  artists 
valued  and  cultivated  for  their  own  sake.  Hence  a  new 
sort  of  mythology,  with  a  tone  and  qualities  of  its  own. 
When  the  ship-load  of  sacred  earth  from  the  soil  of 
Jerusalem  was  mingled  with  the  common  clay  in  the 
Campo  Santo  at  Pisa,  a  new  flower  grew  up  from  it,  un- 
like any  flower  men  had  seen  before,  the  anemone  with 
its  concentric  rings  of  strangely  blended  color,  still  to  be 
found  by  those  who  search  long  enough  for  it,  in  the 
long  grass  of  the  Maremma.  Just  such  a  strange  flower 
was  that  mythology  of  the  Italian  Renaissance,  which 
grew  up  from  the  mixture  of  two  traditions,  two  senti- 


PICO  DELLA  MIRANDOLA  39 

ments,  the  sacred  and  the  profane.  Classical  story  was 
regarded  as  so  much  imaginative  material  to  be  received 
and  assimilated.  It  did  not  come  into  men's  minds  to 
ask  curiously  of  science,  concerning  the  origin  of  such 
story,  its  primary  form  and  import,  its  meaning  for  those 
who  projected  it.  The  thing  sank  into  their  minds,  to 
issue  forth  again  with  all  the  tangle  about  it  of  medieval 
sentiment  and  ideas.  In  the  Doni  Madonna  in  the 
Tribune  of  the  Ufiizii,  Michelangelo  actually  brings  the 
pagan  religion,  and  with  it  the  unveiled  human  form, 
the  sleepy-looking  fauns  of  a  Dionysiac  revel,  into  the 
presence  of  the  Madonna,  as  simpler  painters  had  intro- 
duced there  other  products  of  the  earth,  birds  or  flowers, 
while  he  has  given  to  that  Madonna  herself  much  of  the 
uncouth  energy  of  the  older  and  more  primitive  "Mighty 
Mother." 

This  picturesque  union  of  contrasts,  belonging  prop- 
erly to  the  art  of  the  close  of  the  fifteenth  century,  per- 
vades, in  Pico  della  Mirandola,  an  actual  person  and 
that  is  why  the  figure  of  Pico  is  so  attractive.  He  will 
not  let  one  go ;  he  wins  one  on,  in  spite  of  one's  self,  to 
turn  again  to  the  pages  of  his  forgotten  books,  although 
we  know  already  that  the  actual  solution  proposed  in 
them  will  satisfy  us  as  little  as  perhaps  it  satisfied  him. 
It  is  said  that  in  his  eagerness  for  mysterious  learning 
he  once  paid  a  great  sum  for  a  collection  of  cabalistic 
manuscripts,  which  turned  out  to  be  forgeries;  and  the 
story  might  well  stand  as  a  parable  of  all  he  ever  seemed 
to  gain  in  the  way  of  actual  knowledge.  He  had  sought 
knowledge,  and  passed  from  system  to  system,  and 
hazarded  much ;  but  less  for  the  sake  of  positive  knowl- 
edge than  because  he  believed  there  was  a  spirit  of  order 


40 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


and  beauty  in  knowledge,  which  would  come  down  and 
unite  what  men's  ignorance  had  divided,  and  renew  what 
time  had  made  dim.  And  so,  while  his  actual  work  has 
passed  away,  yet  his  own  qualities  are  still  active,  and 
himself  remains,  as  one  alive  in  the  grave,  caesiis  et 
vigilibus  oculis,  as  his  biographer  describes  him,  and 
with  that  sanguine,  clear  skin,  decenti  rubore  interspersa, 
as  with  the  light  of  morning  upon  it ;  and  he  has  a  true 
place  in  that  group  of  great  Italians  who  fill  the  end  of 
the  fifteenth  century  with  their  names,  he  is  a  true 
humanist.  For  the  essence  of  humanism  is  that  belief 
of  which  he  seems  never  to  have  doubted,  that  nothing 
which  has  ever  interested  living  men  and  women  can 
wholly  lose  its  vitality — no  language  they  have  spoken, 
nor  oracle  beside  which  they  have  hushed  their  voices, 
no  dream  which  has  once  been  entertained  by  actual 
human  minds,  nothing  about  which  they  have  ever  been 
passionate,  or  expended  time  and  zeal. 

1871. 


SANDRO  BOTTICELLI 


In  Leonardo's  treatise  on  painting  only  one  contem- 
porary is  mentioned  by  name — Sandro  Botticelli.  This 
preeminence  may  be  due  to  chance  only,  but  to  some  will 
rather  appear  a  result  of  deliberate  judgment;  for  peo- 
ple have  begun  to  find  out  the  charm  of  Botticelli's  work, 
and  his  name,  little  known  in  the  last  century,  is  quietly 
becoming  important.  In  the  middle  of  the  fifteenth  cen- 
tury he  had  already  anticipated  much  of  that  meditative 
subtlety,  which  is  sometimes  supposed  peculiar  to  the 
great  imaginative  workmen  of  its  close.  Leaving  the 
simple  religion  which  had  occupied  the  followers  of 
Giotto  for  a  century,  and  the  simple  naturalism  which 
had  grown  out  of  it,  a  thing  of  birds  and  flowers  only, 
he  sought  inspiration  in  what  to  him  were  works  of  the 
modern  world,  the  writings  of  Dante  and  Boccaccio,  and 
in  new  readings  of  his  own  of  classical  stories :  or,  if  he 
painted  religious  incidents,  painted  them  with  an  under- 
current of  original  sentiment,  which  touches  you  as  the 
real  matter  of  the  picture  through  the  veil  of  its  ostensi- 
ble subject.  What  is  the  peculiar  sensation,  what  is  the 
peculiar  quality  of  pleasure,  which  his  work  has  the 
property  of  exciting  in  us,  and  which  we  cannot  get 
elsewhere?  For  this,  especially  when  he  has  to  speak 
of  a  comparatively  unknown  artist,  is  always  the  chief 
question  which  a  critic  has  to  answer. 

In  an  age  when  the  lives  of  artists  were  full  of  adven- 

4i 


42 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


ture,  his  life  is  almost  colorless.  Criticism,  indeed,  has 
cleared  away  much  of  the  gossip  which  Vasari  accumu- 
lated, has  touched  the  legend  of  Lippo  and  Lucrezia, 
and  rehabilitated  the  character  of  Andrea  del  Castagno. 
But  in  Botticelli's  case  there  is  no  legend  to  dissipate. 
He  did  not  even  go  by  his  true  name :  Sandro  is  a  nick- 
name, and  his  true  name  is  Filipepi,  Botticelli  being  only 
the  name  of  the  goldsmith  who  first  taught  him  art. 
Only  two  things  happened  to  him,  two  things  which  he 
shared  with  other  artists: — he  was  invited  to  Rome  to 
paint  in  the  Sistine  Chapel,  and  he  fell  in  later  life  under 
the  influence  of  Savonarola,  passing  apparently  almost 
out  of  men's  sight  in  a  sort  of  religious  melancholy, 
which  lasted  till  his  death  in  15 15,  according  to  the  re- 
ceived date.  Vasari  says  that  he  plunged  into  the  study 
of  Dante,  and  even  wrote  a  comment  on  the  Divine 
Comedy.  But  it  seems  strange  that  he  should  have  lived 
on  inactive  so  long;  and  one  almost  wishes  that  some 
document  might  come  to  light,  which,  fixing  the  date  of 
his  death  earlier,  might  relieve  one,  in  thinking  of  him, 
of  his  dejected  old  age. 

He  is  before  all  things  a  poetical  painter,  blending  the 
charm  of  story  and  sentiment,  the  medium  of  the  art  of 
poetry,  with  the  charm  of  line  and  color,  the  medium 
of  abstract  painting.  So  he  becomes  the  illustrator  of 
Dante.  In  a  few  rare  examples  of  the  edition  of  1481, 
the  blank  spaces,  left  at  the  beginning  of  every  canto 
for  the  hand  of  the  illuminator,  have  been  filled,  as  far 
as  the  nineteenth  canto  of  the  Inferno,  with  impres- 
sions of  engraved  plates,  seemingly  by  way  of  experi- 
ment, for  in  the  copy  in  the  Bodleian  Library,  one  of  the 
three  impressions  it  contains  has  been  printed  upside 


SANDRO  BOTTICELLI 


43 


down,  and  much  awry,  in  the  midst  of  the  luxurious 
printed  page.  Giotto,  and  the  followers  of  Giotto,  with 
their  almost  childish  religious  aim,  had  not  learned  to 
put  that  weight  of  meaning  into  outward  things,  light, 
color,  everyday  gesture,  which  the  poetry  of  the  Divine 
Comedy  involves,  and  before  the  fifteenth  century  Dante 
could  hardly  have  found  an  illustrator.  Botticelli's  illus- 
trations are  crowded  with  incident,  blending,  with  a 
naive  carelessness  of  pictorial  propriety,  three  phases  of 
the  same  scene  into  one  plate.  The  grotesques,  so  often 
a  stumbling-block  to  painters,  who  forget  that  the  words 
of  a  poet,  which  only  feebly  present  an  image  to  the 
mind,  must  be  lowered  in  key  when  translated  into  visible 
form,  make  one  regret  that  he  has  not  rather  chosen  for 
illustration  the  more  subdued  imagery  of  the  Purgatorio. 
Yet  in  the  scene  of  those  who  "go  down  quick  into  hell/* 
there  is  an  inventive  force  about  the  fire  taking  hold  on 
the  upturned  soles  of  the  feet,  which  proves  that  the 
design  is  no  mere  translation  of  Dante's  words,  but  a 
true  painter's  vision;  while  the  scene  of  the  Centaurs 
wins  one  at  once,  for,  forgetful  of  the  actual  circum- 
stances of  their  appearance,  Botticelli  has  gone  off  with 
delight  on  the  thought  of  the  Centaurs  themselves,  bright, 
small  creatures  of  the  woodland,  with  arch  baby  faces 
and  mignon  forms,  drawing  tiny  bows. 

Botticelli  lived  in  a  generation  of  naturalists,  and  he 
might  have  been  a  mere  naturalist  among  them.  There 
are  traces  enough  in  his  work  of  that  alert  sense  of  out- 
ward things,  which,  in  the  pictures  of  that  period,  fills 
the  lawns  with  delicate  living  creatures,  and  the  hillsides 
with  pools  of  water,  and  the  pools  of  water  with  flower- 
ing reeds.    But  this  was  not  enough  for  him;  he  is  a 


44 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


visionary  painter,  and  in  his  visionariness  he  resembles 
Dante.  Giotto,  the  tried  companion  of  Dante,  Masaccio, 
Ghirlandajo  even,  do  but  transcribe,  with  more  or  less 
refining,  the  outward  image;  they  are  dramatic,  not 
visionary  painters;  they  are  almost  impassive  spectators 
of  the  action  before  them.  But  the  genius  of  which 
Botticelli  is  the  type  usurps  the  data  before  it  as  the 
exponent  of  ideas,  moods,  visions  of  its  own;  in  this 
interest  it  plays  fast  and  loose  with  those  data,  rejecting 
some  and  isolating  others,  and  always  combining  them 
anew.  To  him,  as  to  Dante,  the  scene,  the  color,  the  out- 
ward image  or  gesture,  comes  with  all  its  incisive  and 
importunate  reality;  but  awakes  in  him,  moreover,  by 
some  subtle  law  of  his  own  structure,  a  mood  which  it 
awakes  in  no  one  else,  of  which  it  is  the  double  or  repeti- 
tion, and  which  it  clothes,  that  all  may  share  it,  with 
visible  circumstance. 

But  he  is  far  enough  from  accepting  the  conventional 
orthodoxy  of  Dante  which,  referring  all  human  action 
to  the  simple  formula  of  purgatory,  heaven  and  hell, 
leaves  an  insoluble  element  of  prose  in  the  depths  of 
Dante's  poetry.  One  picture  of  his,  with  the  portrait  of 
the  donor,  Matteo  Palmieri,  below,  had  the  credit  or 
discredit  of  attracting  some  shadow  of  ecclesiastical  cen- 
sure. This  Matteo  Palmieri  (two  dim  figures  move 
under  that  name  in  contemporary  history)  was  the  re- 
puted author  of  a  poem,  still  unedited,  "La  Citta  Divina," 
which  represented  the  human  race  as  an  incarnation  of 
those  angels  who,  in  the  revolt  of  Lucifer,  were  neither 
for  Jehovah  nor  for  His  enemies,  a  fantasy  of  that  earlier 
Alexandrian  philosophy  about  which  the  Florentine  in- 
tellect in  that  century  was  so  curious.    Botticelli's  pic- 


SANDRO  BOTTICELLI 


45 


ture  may  have  been  only  one  of  those  familiar  composi- 
tions in  which  religious  reverie  has  recorded  its  impres- 
sions of  the  various  forms  of  beatified  existence — 
Glorias,  as  they  were  called,  like  that  in  which  Giotto 
painted  the  portrait  of  Dante;  but  somehow  it  was  sus- 
pected of  embodying  in  a  picture  the  wayward  dream  of 
Palmieri,  and  the  chapel  where  it  hung  was  closed. 
Artists  so  entire  as  Botticelli  are  usually  careless  about 
philosophical  theories,  even  when  the  philosopher  is  a 
Florentine  of  the  fifteenth  century,  and  his  work  a  poem 
in  terza  rima.  But  Botticelli,  who  wrote  a  commentary 
on  Dante,  and  became  the  disciple  of  Savonarola,  may 
well  have  let  such  theories  come  and  go  across  him. 
True  or  false,  the  story  interprets  much  of  the  peculiar 
sentiment  with  which  he  infuses  his  profane  and  sacred 
persons,  comely,  and  in  a  certain  sense  like  angels,  but 
with  a  sense  of  displacement  or  loss  about  them — the 
wistfulness  of  exiles,  conscious  of  a  passion  and  energy 
greater  than  any  known  issue  of  them  explains,  which 
runs  through  all  his  varied  work  with  a  sentiment  of 
ineffable  melancholy. 

So  just  what  Dante  scorns  as  unworthy  alike  of 
heaven  and  hell,  Botticelli  accepts,  that  middle  world  in 
which  men  take  no  side  in  great  conflicts,  and  decide  no 
great  causes,  and  make  great  refusals.  He  thus  sets  for 
himself  the  limits  within  which  art,  undisturbed  by  any 
moral  ambition,  does  its  most  sincere  and  surest  work. 
His  interest  is  neither  in  the  untempered  goodness  of 
Angelico's  saints,  nor  the  untempered  evil  of  Orcagna's 
Inferno;  but  with  men  and  women,  in  their  mixed  and 
uncertain  condition,  always  attractive,  clothed  sometimes 
by  passion  with  a  character  of  loveliness  and  energy,  bu* 


46 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


saddened  perpetually  by  the  shadow  upon  them  of  the 
great  things  from  which  they  shrink.  His  morality  is 
all  sympathy ;  and  it  is  this  sympathy,  conveying  into  his 
work  somewhat  more  than  is  usual  of  the  true  com- 
plexion of  humanity,  which  makes  him,  visionary  as  he 
is,  so  forcible  a  realist. 

It  is  this  which  gives  to  his  Madonnas  their  unique 
expression  and  charm.  He  has  worked  out  in  them  a 
distinct  and  peculiar  type,  definite  enough  in  his  own 
mind,  for  he  has  painted  it  over  and  over  again,  some- 
times one  might  think  almost  mechanically,  as  a  pastime 
during  that  dark  period  when  his  thoughts  were  so  heavy 
upon  him.  Hardly  any  collection  of  note  is  without  one 
of  these  circular  pictures,  into  which  the  attendant  an- 
gels depress  their  heads  so  naively.  Perhaps  you  have 
sometimes  wondered  why  those  peevish-looking  Ma- 
donnas, conformed  to  no  acknowledged  or  obvious  type 
of  beauty,  attract  you  more  and  more,  and  often  come 
back  to  you  when  the  Sistine  Madonna  and  the  Virgins 
of  Fra  Angelico  are  forgotten.  At  first,  contrasting  them 
with  those,  you  may  have  thought  that  there  was  some- 
thing in  them  mean  or  abject  even,  for  the  abstract  lines 
of  the  face  have  little  nobleness,  and  the  color  is  wan. 
For  with  Botticelli  she  too,  though  she  holds  in  her 
hands  the  "Desire  of  all  nations/'  is  one  of  those  who 
are  neither  for  Jehovah  nor  for  His  enemies ;  and  her 
choice  is  on  her  face.  The  white  light  on  it  is  cast  up 
hard  and  cheerless  from  below,  as  when  snow  lies  upon 
the  ground,  and  the  children  look  up  with  surprise  at 
the  strange  whiteness  of  the  ceiling.  Her  trouble  is  in 
the  very  caress  of  the  mysterious  child,  whose  gaze  is 
always  far  from  her,  and  who  has  already  that  sweet 


SANDRO  BOTTICELLI 


47 


look  of  devotion  which  men  have  never  been  able  alto- 
gether to  love,  and  which  still  makes  the  born  saint  an 
object  almost  of  suspicion  to  his  earthly  brethren.  Once, 
indeed,  he  guides  her  hand  to  transcribe  in  a  book  the 
words  of  her  exaltation,  the  Ave,  and  the  Magnificat, 
and  the  Gaude  Maria,  and  the  young  angels,  glad  to 
rouse  her  for  a  moment  from  her  dejection,  are  eager 
to  hold  the  inkhorn  and  to  support  the  book.  But  the 
pen  almost  drops  from  her  hand,  and  the  high  cold  words 
have  no  meaning  for  her,  and  her  true  children  are  those 
others,  among  whom,  in  her  rude  home,  the  intolerable 
honor  came  to  her,  with  that  look  of  wistful  inquiry  on 
their  irregular  faces  which  you  see  in  startled  animals — 1 
gipsy  children,  such  as  those  who,  in  Apennine  villages, 
still  hold  out  their  long,  brown  arms  to  beg  of  you,  but 
on  Sundays  become  enfants  du  chceur,  with  their  thick 
black  hair  nicely  combed,  and  fair  white  linen  on  their 
sunburnt  throats. 

What  is  strangest  is  that  he  carries  this  sentiment  into 
classical  subjects,  its  most  complete  expression  being  a 
picture  in  the  UfFizii,  of  Venus  rising  from  the  sea,  in 
which  the  grotesque  emblems  of  the  middle  age,  and  a 
landscape  full  of  its  peculiar  feeling,  and  even  its  strange 
draperies,  powdered  all  over  in  the  Gothic  manner  with 
a  quaint  conceit  of  daisies,  frame  a  figure  that  reminds 
you  of  the  faultless  nude  studies  of  Ingres.  At  first, 
perhaps,  you  are  attracted  only  by  a  quaintness  of  de- 
sign, which  seems  to  recall  all  at  once  whatever  you  have 
read  of  Florence  in  the  fifteenth  century;  afterwards  you 
may  think  that  this  quaintness  must  be  incongruous  with 
the  subject,  and  that  the  color  is  cadaverous  or  at  least 
cold.    And  yet,  the  more  you  come  to  understand  what 


*8 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


imaginative  coloring  really  is,  that  all  color  is  no  mere 
delightful  quality  of  natural  things,  but  a  spirit  upon 
them  by  which  they  become  expressive  to  the  spirit,  the 
better  you  will  like  this  peculiar  quality  of  color;  and 
you  will  find  that  quaint  design  of  Botticelli's  a  more 
direct  inlet  into  the  Greek  temper  than  the  works  of  the 
Greeks  themselves  even  of  the  finest  period.  Of  the 
Greeks  as  they  really  were,  of  their  difference  from  our- 
selves, of  the  aspects  of  their  outward  life,  we  know  far 
more  than  Botticelli,  or  his  most  learned  contemporaries ; 
but  for  us  long  familiarity  has  taken  off  the  edge  of  the 
lesson,  and  we  are  hardly  conscious  of  what  we  owe  to 
the  Hellenic  spirit.  But  in  pictures  like  this  of  Botti- 
celli's you  have  a  record  of  the  first  impression  made 
by  it  on  minds  turned  back  towards  it,  in  almost  painful 
aspiration,  from  a  world  in  which  it  had  been  ignored 
so  long;  and  in  the  passion,  the  energy,  the  industry  of 
realisation,  with  which  Botticelli  carries  out  his  intention, 
is  the  exact  measure  of  the  legitimate  influence  over  the 
human  mind  of  the  imaginative  system  of  which  this  is 
perhaps  the  central  myth.  The  light  is  indeed  cold — 
mere  sunless  dawn;  but  a  later  painter  would  have 
cloyed  you  with  sunshine;  and  you  can  see  the  better 
for  that  quietness  in  the  morning  air  each  long  promon- 
tory, as  it  slopes  down  to  the  water's  edge.  Men  go 
forth  to  their  labors  until  the  evening;  but  she  is  awake 
before  them,  and  you  might  think  that  the  sorrow  in  her 
face  was  at  the  thought  of  the  whole  long  day  of  love 
yet  to  come.  An  emblematical  figure  of  the  wind  blows 
hard  across  the  grey  water,  moving  forward  the  dainty- 
lipped  shell  on  which  she  sails,  the  sea  "showing  his 
teeth/'  as  it  moves,  in  thin  lines  of  foam,  and  sucking  in, 


SANDRO  BOTTICELLI 


49 


one  by  one,  the  falling  roses,  each  severe  in  outline, 
plucked  off  short  at  the  stalk,  but  embrowned  a  little,  as 
Botticelli's  flowers  always  are.  Botticelli  meant  all  this 
imagery  to  be  altogether  pleasurable;  and  it  was  partly 
an  incompleteness  of  resources,  inseparable  from  the  art 
of  that  time,  that  subdued  and  chilled  it.  But  this  pre- 
dilection for  minor  tones  counts  also;  and  what  is  un- 
mistakable is  the  sadness  with  which  he  has  conceived 
the  goddess  of  pleasure,  as  the  depositary  of  a  great 
power  over  the  lives  of  men. 

I  have  said  that  the  peculiar  character  of  Botticelli  is 
the  result  of  a  blending  in  him  of  a  sympathy  for  hu- 
manity in  its  uncertain  condition,  its  attractiveness,  its 
investiture  at  rarer  moments  in  a  character  of  loveliness 
and  energy,  with  his  consciousness  of  the  shadow  upon 
it  of  the  great  things  from  which  it  shrinks,  and  that 
this  conveys  into  his  work  somewhat  more  than  paint- 
ing usually  attains  of  the  true  complexion  of  humanity. 
He  paints  the  story  of  the  goddess  of  pleasure  in  other 
episodes  besides  that  of  her  birth  from  the  sea,  but 
never  without  some  shadow  of  death  in  the  grey  flesh 
and  wan  flowers.  He  paints  Madonnas,  but  they  shrink 
from  the  pressure  of  the  divine  child,  and  plead  in  un- 
mistakable undertones  for  a  warmer,  lower  humanity. 
The  same  figure — tradition  connects  it  with  Simonetta, 
the  Mistress  of  Giuliano  de'  Medici — appears  again  as 
Judith,  returning  home  across  the  hill  country,  when  the 
great  deed  is  over,  and  the  moment  of  revulsion  come, 
when  the  olive  branch  in  her  hand  is  becoming  a  burthen ; 
as  Justice,  sitting  on  a  throne,  but  with  a  fixed  look  of 
self-hatred  which  makes  the  sword  in  her  hand  seem 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


that  of  a  suicide;  and  again  as  Veritas,  in  the  allegorical 
picture  of  Calumnia,  where  one  may  note  in  passing  the 
suggestiveness  of  an  accident  which  identifies  the  image 
of  Truth  with  the  person  of  Venus.  We  might  trace 
the  same  sentiment  through  his  engravings ;  but  his  share 
in  them  is  doubtful,  and  the  object  of  this  brief  study 
has  been  attained,  if  I  have  defined  aright  the  temper  in 
which  he  worked. 

But,  after  all,  it  may  be  asked,  is  a  painter  like  Botti- 
celli— a  secondary  painter,  a  proper  subject  for  general 
criticism?  There  are  a  few  great  painters,  like  Michel- 
angelo or  Leonardo,  whose  work  has  become  a  force  in 
general  culture,  partly  for  this  very  reason  that  they 
have  absorbed  into  themselves  all  such  workmen  as 
Sandro  Botticelli;  and,  over  and  above  mere  technical 
or  antiquarian  criticism,  general  criticism  may  be  very 
well  employed  in  that  sort  of  interpretation  which  ad- 
justs the  position  of  these  men  to  general  culture, 
whereas  smaller  men  can  be  the  proper  subjects  only  of 
technical  or  antiquarian  treatment.  But,  besides  those 
great  men,  there  is  a  certain  number  of  artists  who  have 
a  distinct  faculty  of  their  own  by  which  they  convey  to 
us  a  peculiar  quality  of  pleasure  which  we  cannot  get 
elsewhere ;  and  these,  too,  have  their  place  in  general  cul- 
ture, and  must  be  interpreted  to  it  by  those  who  have 
felt  their  charm  strongly,  and  are  often  the  object  of  a 
special  diligence  and  a  consideration  wholly  affectionate, 
just  because  there  is  not  about  them  the  stress  of  a  great 
name  and  authority.  Of  this  select  number  Botticelli  is 
one.  He  has  the  freshness,  the  uncertain  and  diffident 
promise,  which  belong  to  the  earlier  Renaissance  itself, 


SANDRO  BOTTICELLI 


51 


and  make  it  perhaps  the  most  interesting  period  in  the 
history  of  the  mind.  In  studying  his  work  one  begins  to 
understand  to  how  great  a  place  in  human  culture  th& 
art  of  Italy  had  been  called. 


1870. 


LUCA  DELLA  ROBBIA 


The  Italian  sculptors  of  the  earlier  half  of  the  fif- 
teenth century  are  more  than  mere  forerunners  of  the 
great  masters  of  its  close,  and  often  reach  perfection, 
within  the  narrow  limits  which  they  chose  to  impose  on 
their  work.  Their  sculpture  shares  with  the  paintings 
of  Botticelli  and  the  churches  of  Brunelleschi  that  pro- 
found expressiveness,  that  intimate  impress  of  an  in- 
dwelling soul,  which  is  the  peculiar  fascination  of  the 
art  of  Italy  in  that  century.  Their  works  have  been 
much  neglected,  and  often  almost  hidden  away  amid  the 
frippery  of  modern  decoration,  and  we  come  with  some 
surprise  on  the  places  where  their  fire  still  smolders. 
One  longs  to  penetrate  into  the  lives  of  the  men  who 
have  given  expression  to  so  much  power  and  sweetness. 
But  it  is  part  of  the  reserve,  the  austere  dignity  and 
simplicity  of  their  existence,  that  their  histories  are  for 
the  most  part  lost,  or  told  but  briefly.  From  their  lives, 
as  from  their  work,  all  tumult  of  sound  and  color  has 
passed  away.  Mino,  the  Raphael  of  sculpture,  Maso  del 
Rodario,  whose  works  add  a  further  grace  to  the  church 
of  Como,  Donatello  even, — one  asks  in  vain  for  more 
than  a  shadowy  outline  of  their  actual  days. 

Something  more  remains  of  Luca  della  Robbia ;  some- 
thing more  of  a  history,  of  outward  changes  and  for- 
tunes, is  expressed  through  his  work.  I  suppose  nothing 
brings  the  real  air  of  a  Tuscan  town  so  vividly  to  mind 

52 


LUCA  DELLA  ROBBIA 


S3 


as  those  pieces  of  pale  blue  and  white  earthenware,  by 
which  he  is  best  known,  like  fragments  of  the  milky  sky 
itself,  fallen  into  the  cool  streets,  and  breaking  into  the 
darkened  churches.  And  no  work  is  less  imitable :  like 
Tuscan  wine,  it  loses  its  savor  when  moved  from  its 
birthplace,  from  the  crumbling  walls  where  it  was  first 
placed.  Part  of  the  charm  of  this  work,  its  grace  and 
purity  and  finish  of  expression,  is  common  to  all  the 
Tuscan  sculptors  of  the  fifteenth  century;  for  Luca  was 
first  of  all  a  worker  in  marble,  and  his  works  in  terra 
cotta  only  transfer  to  a  different  material  the  principles 
of  his  sculpture. 

These  Tuscan  sculptors  of  the  fifteenth  century  worked 
for  the  most  part  in  low  relief,  giving  even  to  their  monu- 
mental effigies  something  of  its  depression  of  surface, 
getting  into  them  by  this  means  a  pathetic  suggestion  of 
the  wasting  and  etherealisation  of  death.  They  are 
haters  of  all  heaviness  and  emphasis,  of  strongly-opposed 
light  and  shade,  and  seek  their  means  of  delineation 
among  those  last  refinements  of  shadow,  which  are  al- 
most invisible  except  in  a  strong  light,  and  which  the 
finest  pencil  can  hardly  follow.  The  whole  essence  of 
their  work  is  expression,  the  passing  of  a  smile  over  the 
face  of  a  child,  the  ripple  of  the  air  on  a  still  day  over 
the  curtain  of  a  window  ajar. 

What  is  the  precise  value  of  this  system  of  sculpture, 
this  low  relief?  Luca  della  Robbia,  and  the  other 
sculptors  of  the  school  to  which  he  belongs,  have  before 
them  the  universal  problem  of  their  art;  and  this  system 
of  low  relief  is  the  means  by  which  they  meet  and  over* 
come  the  special  limitation  of  sculpture. 

That  limitation  results  from  the  material  and  other 


54 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


necessary  conditions  of  all  sculptured  work,  and  con- 
sists in  the  tendency  of  such  work  to  a  hard  realism,  a 
one-sided  presentment  of  mere  form,  that  solid  material 
frame  which  only  motion  can  relieve,  a  thing  of  heavy 
shadows,  and  an  individuality  of  expression  pushed  to 
caricature.  Against  this  tendency  to  the  hard  present- 
ment of  mere  form  trying  vainly  to  compete  with  the 
reality  of  nature  itself,  all  noble  sculpture  constantly 
struggles;  each  great  system  of  sculpture  resisting  it  in 
its  own  way,  etherealising,  spiritualising,  relieving  its 
stiffness,  its  heaviness,  and  death.  The  use  of  color  in 
sculpture  is  but  an  unskilful  contrivance  to  effect,  by 
borrowing  from  another  art,  what  the  nobler  sculpture 
effects  by  strictly  appropriate  means.  To  get  not  color, 
but  the  equivalent  of  color ;  to  secure  the  expression  and 
the  play  of  life;  to  expand  the  too  firmly  fixed  individ- 
uality of  pure,  unrelieved,  uncolored  form: — this  is  the 
problem  which  the  three  great  styles  in  sculpture  have 
solved  in  three  different  ways. 

Allgemeinheit — breadth,  generality,  universality, — is 
the  word  chosen  by  Winckelmann,  and  after  him  by 
Goethe  and  many  German  critics,  to  express  that  law  of 
the  most  excellent  Greek  sculptors,  of  Pheidias  and  his 
pupils,  which  prompted  them  constantly  to  seek  the  type 
in  the  individual,  to  abstract  and  express  only  what  is 
structural  and  permanent,  to  purge  from  the  individual 
all  that  belongs  only  to  him,  all  the  accidents,  the  feel- 
ings and  actions  of  the  special  moment,  all  that  (because 
in  its  own  nature  it  endures  but  for  a  moment)  is  apt  to 
look  like  a  frozen  thing  if  one  arrests  it. 

In  this  way  their  works  came  to  be  like  some  subtle 
extract  or  essence,  or  almost  like  pure  thoughts  or  ideas : 


LUCA  DELLA  ROBBIA 


55 


and  hence  the  breadth  of  humanity  in  them,  that  detach- 
ment from  the  conditions  of  a  particular  place  or  people, 
which  has  carried  their  influence  far  beyond  the  age 
which  produced  them,  and  insured  them  universal  ac- 
ceptance. 

That  was  the  Greek  way  of  relieving  the  hardness  and 
unspirituality  of  pure  form.  But  it  involved  to  a  certain 
degree  the  sacrifice  of  what  we  call  expression;  and  a 
system  of  abstraction  which  aimed  always  at  the  broad 
and  general  type,  at  the  purging  away  from  the  individ- 
ual of  what  belonged  only  to  him,  and  of  the  mere  acci- 
dents of  a  particular  time  and  place,  imposed  upon  the 
range  of  effects  open  to  the  Greek  sculptor  limits  some- 
what narrowly  defined.  When  Michelangelo  came, 
therefore,  with  a  genius  spiritualised  by  the  reverie  of 
the  middle  age,  penetrated  by  its  spirit  of  inwardness 
and  introspection,  living  not  a  mere  outward  life  like 
the  Greek,  but  a  life  full  of  intimate  experiences,  sor- 
rows, consolations,  a  system  which  sacrificed  so  much  of 
what  was  inward  and  unseen  could  not  satisfy  him.  To 
him,  lover  and  student  of  Greek  sculpture  as  he  was, 
work  which  did  not  bring  what  was  inward  to  the  sur- 
face, which  was  not  concerned  with  individual  expres- 
sion, with  individual  character  and  feeling,  the  special 
history  of  the  special  soul,  was  not  worth  doing  at  all. 

And  so,  in  a  way  quite  personal  and  peculiar  to  him- 
self, which  often  is,  and  always  seems,  the  effect  of 
accident,  he  secured  for  his  work  individuality  and  in- 
tensity of  expression,  while  he  avoided  a  too  heavy 
realism,  that  tendency  to  harden  into  caricature  which 
the  representation  of  feeling  in  sculpture  is  apt  to  dis- 
play.  What  time  and  accident,  its  centuries  of  darkness 


56 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


under  the  furrows  of  the  "little  Melian  farm,"  have 
done  with  singular  felicity  of  touch  for  the  Venus  of 
Melos,  fraying  its  surface  and  softening  its  lines,  so 
that  some  spirit  in  the  thing  seems  always  on  the  point 
of  breaking  out,  as  though  in  it  classical  sculpture  had 
advanced  already  one  step  into  the  mystical  Christian 
age,  its  expression  being  in  the  whole  range  of  ancient 
work  most  like  that  of  Michelangelo's  own: — this  effect 
Michelangelo  gains  by  leaving  nearly  all  his  sculpture  in 
a  puzzling  sort  of  incompleteness,  which  suggests  rather 
than  realises  actual  form.  Something  of  the  wasting  of 
that  snow-image  which  he  molded  at  the  command  of 
Piero  de'  Medici,  when  the  snow  lay  one  night  in  the 
court  of  the  Pitti  palace,  almost  always  lurks  about  it, 
as  if  he  had  determined  to  make  the  quality  of  a  task, 
exacted  from  him  half  in  derision,  the  pride  of  all  his 
work.  Many  have  wondered  at  that  incompleteness,  sus- 
pecting, however,  that  Michelangelo  himself  loved  and 
was  loath  to  change  it,  and  feeling  at  the  same  time  that 
they,  too,  would  lose  something  if  the  half-realised  form 
ever  quite  emerged  from  the  stone,  so  rough-hewn  here, 
so  delicately  finished  there;  and  they  have  wished  to 
fathom  the  charm  of  this  incompleteness.  Well!  that 
incompleteness  is  Michelangelo's  equivalent  for  color  in 
sculpture;  it  is  his  way  of  etherealizing  pure  form,  of 
relieving  its  stiff  realism,  and  communicating  to  it 
breath,  pulsation,  the  effect  of  life.  It  was  a  character- 
istic, too,  which  fell  in  with  his  peculiar  temper  and  mode 
of  living,  his  disappointments  and  hesitations.  And  it 
was  in  reality  perfect  finish.  In  this  way  he  combines 
the  utmost  amount  of  passion  and  intensity  with  the 


LUCA  DELLA  ROBBIA 


57 


sense  of  a  yielding  and  flexible  life :  he  gets  not  vitality 
merely,  but  a  wonderful  force  of  expression. 

Midway  between  these  two  systems — the  system  of 
the  Greek  sculptors  and  the  system  of  Michelangelo — 
comes  the  system  of  Luca  della  Robbia  and  the  other 
Tuscan  sculptors  of  the  fifteenth  century,  partaking  both 
of  the  Allgemeinheit  of  the  Greeks,  their  way  of  ex- 
tracting certain  select  elements  only  of  pure  form  and 
sacrificing  all  the  rest,  and  the  studied  incompleteness  of 
Michelangelo,  relieving  that  sense  of  intensity,  passion, 
energy,  which  might  otherwise  have  stiffened  into  cari- 
cature. Like  Michelangelo,  these  sculptors  fill  their 
works  with  intense  and  individualised  expression.  Their 
noblest  works  are  the  careful  sepulchral  portraits  of  par- 
ticular persons — the  monument  of  Conte  Ugo  in  the 
Badta  of  Florence,  of  the  youthful  Medea  Colleoni,  with 
the  wonderful,  long  throat,  in  the  chapel  on  the  cool 
north  side  of  the  Church  of  Santa  Maria  Maggiore  at 
Bergamo — monuments  such  as  abound  in  the  churches 
of  Rome,  inexhaustible  in  suggestions  of  repose,  of  a 
subdued  Sabbatic  joy,  a  kind  of  sacred  grace  and  refine- 
ment. And  these  elements  of  tranquillity,  of  repose,  they 
unite  to  an  intense  and  individual  expression  by  a  sys- 
tem of  conventionalism  as  skilful  and  subtle  as  that  of 
the  Greeks,  repressing  all  such  curves  as  indicate  solid 
form,  and  throwing  the  whole  into  low  relief. 

The  life  of  Luca,  a  life  of  labor  and  frugality,  with 
no  adventure  and  no  excitement  except  what  belongs  to 
the  trial  of  new  artistic  processes,  the  struggle  with  new 
artistic  difficulties,  the  solution  of  purely  artistic  prob- 
lems, fills  the  first  seventy  years  of  the  fifteenth  century. 
After  producing  many  works  in  marble  for  the  Duomo 


58 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


and  the  Campanile  of  Florence,  which  place  him  among 
the  foremost  masters  of  the  sculpture  of  his  age,  he  be- 
came desirous  to  realise  the  spirit  and  manner  of  that 
sculpture,  in  a  humbler  material,  to  unite  its  science,  its 
exquisite  and  expressive  system  of  low  relief,  to  the 
homely  art  of  pottery,  to  introduce  those  high  qualities 
into  common  things,  to  adorn  and  cultivate  daily  house- 
hold life.  In  this  he  is  profoundly  characteristic  of  the 
Florence  of  that  century,  of  that  in  it  which  lay  below 
its  superficial  vanity  and  caprice,  a  certain  old-world 
modesty  and  seriousness  and  simplicity.  People  had  not 
yet  begun  to  think  that  what  was  good  art  for  churches 
was  not  so  good,  or  less  fitted,  for  their  own  houses. 
Luca's  new  wrork  was  in  plain  white  earthenware  at  first, 
a  mere  rough  imitation  of  the  costly,  laboriously  wrought 
marble,  finished  in  a  few  hours.  But  on  this  humble 
path  he  found  his  way  to  a  fresh  success,  to  another 
artistic  grace.  The  fame  of  the  oriental  pottery,  with  its 
strange,  bright  colors — colors  of  art,  colors  not  to  be 
attained  in  the  natural  stone — mingled  with  the  tradition 
of  the  old  Roman  pottery  of  the  neighborhood.  The 
little  red,  coral-like  jars  of  Arezzo,  dug  up  in  that  dis- 
trict from  time  to  time,  are  much  prized.  These  colors 
haunted  Luca's  fancy.  "He  still  continued  seeking  some- 
thing more,"  his  biographer  says  of  him;  "and  instead 
of  making  his  figures  of  baked  earth  simply  white,  he 
added  the  further  invention  of  giving  them  color,  to  the 
astonishment  and  delight  of  all  who  beheld  them" — 
Cosa  singolare,  e  multo  utile  per  la  state! — a  curious 
thing,  and  very  useful  for  summer-time,  full  of  coolness 
and  repose  for  hand  and  eye.  Luca  loved  the  forms  of 
various  fruits,  and  wrought  them  into  all  sorts  of  mar- 


LUCA  DELLA  ROBBIA 


59 


velous  frames  and  garlands,  giving  them  their  natural 
colors,  only  subdued  a  little,  a  little  paler  than  nature. 

I  said  that  the  art  of  Luca  della  Robbia  possessed  in 
an  unusual  measure  that  special  characteristic  which  be- 
longs to  all  the  workmen  of  his  school,  a  characteristic 
which,  even  in  the  absence  of  much  positive  information 
about  their  actual  history,  seems  to  bring  those  workmen 
themselves  very  near  to  us.  They  bear  the  impress  of 
a  personal  quality,  a  prr  found  expressiveness,  what  the 
French  call  intimite,  by  which  is  meant  some  subtler 
sense  of  originality — the  seal  on  a  man's  work  of  what 
is  most  inward  and  peculiar  in  his  moods,  and  manner 
of  apprehension:  it  is  what  we  call  expression,  carried 
to  its  highest  intensity  of  degree.  That  characteristic 
is  rare  in  poetry,  rarer  still  in  art,  rarest  of  all  in  the 
abstract  art  of  sculpture;  yet  essentially,  perhaps,  it  is 
the  quality  which  alone  makes  work  in  the  imaginative 
order  really  worth  having  at  all.  It  is  because  the  works 
of  the  artists  of  the  fifteenth  century  possess  this  quality 
in  an  unmistakable  way  that  one  is  anxious  to  know  all 
that  can  be  known  about  them  and  explain  to  one's  self 
the  secret  of  their  charm. 

1872. 


THE  POETRY  OF  MICHELANGELO 


Critics  of  Michelangelo  have  sometimes  spoken  as  if 
the  only  characteristic  of  his  genius  were  a  wonderful 
strength,  verging,  as  in  the  things  of  the  imagination 
great  strength  always  does,  on  what  is  singular  or 
strange.  A  certain  strangeness,  something  of  the  blos- 
soming of  the  aloe,  is  indeed  an  element  in  all  true  works 
of  art:  that  they  shall  excite  or  surprise  us  is  indispen- 
sable. But  that  they  shall  give  pleasure  and  exert  a 
charm  over  us  is  indispensable,  too ;  and  this  strangeness 
must  be  sweet  also — a  lovely  strangeness.  And  to  the 
true  admirers  of  Michelangelo  this  is  the  true  type  of 
the  Michelangelesque — sweetness  and  strength,  pleasure 
with  surprise,  an  energy  of  conception  which  seems  at 
every  moment  about  to  break  through  all  the  conditions 
of  comely  form,  recovering,  touch  by  touch,  a  loveliness 
found  usually  only  in  the  simplest  natural  things — ex 
forti  dulcedo. 

In  this  way  he  sums  up  for  them  the  whole  character 
of  medieval  art  itself  in  that  which  distinguishes  it  most 
clearly  from  classical  work,  the  presence  of  a  convulsive 
energy  in  it,  becoming  in  lower  hands  merely  monstrous 
or  forbidding,  and  felt,  even  in  its  most  graceful  prod- 
ucts, as  a  subdued  quaintness  or  grotesque.  Yet  those 
who  feel  this  grace  or  sweetness  in  Michelangelo  might 
at  the  first  moment  be  puzzled  if  they  were  asked  wherein 
precisely  such  quality  resided.    Men  of  inventive  tem- 

60 


THE  POETRY  OF  MICHELANGELO  61 


perament — Victor  Hugo,  for  instance,  in  whom,  as  in 
Michelangelo,  people  have  for  the  most  part  been  at- 
tracted or  repelled  by  the  strength,  while  few  have  under- 
stood his  sweetness — have  sometimes  relieved  concep- 
tions of  merely  moral  or  spiritual  greatness,  but  with 
little  aesthetic  charm  of  their  own,  by  lovely  accidents 
or  accessories,  like  the  butterfly  which  alights  on  the 
blood-stained  barricade  in  Les  Miserables  or  those  sea- 
birds  for  whom  the  monstrous  Gilliatt  comes  to  be  as 
some  wild  natural  thing,  so  that  they  are  no  longer  afraid 
of  him,  in  Les  Travailleurs  de  la  Mer.  But  the  austere 
genius  of  Michelangelo  will  not  depend  for  its  sweetness 
on  any  mere  accessories  like  these.  The  world  of  nat- 
ural things  has  almost  no  existence  for  him ;  "When  one 
speaks  of  him,"  says  Grimm,  "woods,  clouds,  seas,  and 
mountains  disappear,  and  only  what  is  formed  by  the 
spirit  of  man  remains  behind";  and  he  quotes  a  few 
slight  words  from  a  letter  of  his  to  Vasari  as  the  single 
expression  in  all  he  has  left  of  a  feeling  for  nature.  He 
has  traced  no  flowers,  like  those  with  which  Leonardo 
stars  over  his  gloomiest  rocks;  nothing  like  the  fret- 
work of  wings  and  flames  in  which  Blake  frames  his 
most  startling  conceptions.  No  forest-scenery  like 
Titian's  fills  his  backgrounds,  but  only  blank  ranges  of 
rock,  and  dim  vegetable  forms  as  blank  as  they,  as  in  a 
world  before  the  creation  of  the  first  five  days. 

Of  the  whole  story  of  the  creation  he  has  painted  only 
the  creation  of  the  first  man  and  woman,  and,  for  him 
at  least,  feebly,  the  creation  of  light.  It  belongs  to  the 
quality  of  his  genius  thus  to  concern  itself  almost  exclu- 
sively with  the  making  of  man.  For  him  it  is  not,  as  in 
the  story  itself,  the  last  and  crowning  act  of  a  series  of 


62 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


developments,  but  the  first  and  unique  act,  the  creation 
of  life  itself  in  its  supreme  form,  off-hand  and  imme- 
diately, in  the  cold  and  lifeless  stone.  With  him  the 
beginning  of  life  has  all  the  characteristics  of  resurrec- 
tion ;  it  is  like  the  recovery  of  suspended  health  or  anima- 
tion, with  its  gratitude,  its  effusion,  and  eloquence.  Fair 
as  the  young  men  of  the  Elgin  marbles,  the  Adam  of  the 
Sistine  Chapel  is  unlike  them  in  a  total  absence  of  that 
balance  and  completeness  which  express  so  well  the  senti- 
ment of  a  self-contained,  independent  life.  In  that  lan- 
guid figure  there  is  something  rude  and  satyr-like,  some- 
thing akin  to  the  rugged  hillside  on  which  it  lies.  His 
whole  form  is  gathered  into  an  expression  of  mere  ex- 
pectancy and  reception;  he  has  hardly  strength  enough 
to  lift  his  finger  to  touch  the  finger  of  the  creator;  yet  a 
touch  of  the  finger-tips  will  suffice. 

This  creation  of  life — life  coming  always  as  relief  or 
recovery,  and  always  in  strong  contrast  with  the  rough- 
hewn  mass  in  which  it  is  kindled — is  in  various  ways 
the  motive  of  all  his  work,  whether  its  immediate  sub- 
ject be  Pagan  or  Christian,  legend  or  allegory;  and  this, 
although  at  least  one-half  of  his  work  was  designed  for 
the  adornment  of  tombs — the  tomb  of  Julius,  the  tombs 
of  the  Medici.  Not  the  Judgment  but  the  Resurrection 
is  the  real  subject  of  his  last  work  in  the  Sistine  Chapel; 
and  his  favorite  Pagan  subject  is  the  legend  of  Leda,  the 
delight  of  the  world  breaking  from  the  egg  of  a  bird. 
As  I  have  already  pointed  out,  he  secures  that  ideality 
of  expression  which  in  Greek  sculpture  depends  on  a 
delicate  system  of  abstraction,  and  in  early  Italian  sculp- 
ture on  lowness  of  relief,  by  an  incompleteness,  which  is 
surely  not  always  undesigned,  and  which,  as  I  think,  no 


THE  POETRY  OF  MICHELANGELO  63 


one  regrets,  and  trusts  to  the  spectator  to  complete  the 
half-emergent  form.  And  as  his  persons  have  some- 
thing of  the  unwrought  stone  about  them,  so,  as  if  to 
realise  the  expression  by  which  the  old  Florentine  rec- 
ords describe  a  sculptor — master  of  live  stone — with 
him  the  very  rocks  seem  to  have  life.  They  have  but 
to  cast  away  the  dust  and  scurf  that  they  may  rise  and 
stand  on  their  feet.  He  loved  the  very  quarries  of  Car- 
rara, those  strange  grey  peaks  which  even  at  mid-day 
convey  into  any  scene  from  which  they  are  visible  some- 
thing of  the  solemnity  and  stillness  of  evening,  some- 
times wandering  among  them  month  after  month,  till  at 
last  their  pale  ashen  colors  seem  to  have  passed  into  his 
painting;  and  on  the  crown  of  the  head^of  the  David 
there  still  remains  a  morsel  of  uncut  stone,  as  if  by  one 
touch  to  maintain  its  connection  with  the  place  from 
which  it  was  hewn. 

And  it  is  in  this  penetrative  suggestion  of  life  that  the 
secret  of  that  sweetness  of  his  is  to  be  found.  He  gives 
us  indeed  no  lovely  natural  objects  like  Leonardo  or 
Titian,  but  only  the  coldest,  most  elementary  shadowing 
of  rock  or  tree ;  no  lovely  draperies  and  comely  gestures 
of  life,  but  only  the  austere  truths  of  human  nature; 
"simple  persons" — as  he  replied  in  his  rough  way  to  the 
querulous  criticism  of  Julius  the  Second,  that  there  was 
no  gold  on  the  figures  of  the  Sistine  Chapel — "simple 
persons,  who  wore  no  gold  on  their  garments" ;  but  he 
penetrates  us  with  a  feeling  of  that  power  which  we 
associate  with  all  the  warmth  and  fullness  of  the  world, 
the  sense  of  which  brings  into  one's  thoughts  a  swarm 
of  birds  and  flowers  and  insects.   The  brooding  spirit  of 


64 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


life  itself  is  there;  and  the  summer  may  burst  out  in  a 
moment. 

He  was  born  in  an  interval  of  a  rapid  midnight  jour- 
ney in  March,  at  a  place  in  the  neighborhood  of  Arezzo, 
the  thin,  clear  air  of  which  was  then  thought  to  be  favor- 
able to  the  birth  of  children  of  great  parts.  He  came  of 
a  race  of  grave  and  dignified  men,  who,  claiming  kin- 
ship with  the  family  of  Canossa,  and  some  color  of  im- 
perial blood  in  their  veins,  had,  generation  after  genera- 
tion, received  honorable  employment  under  the  govern- 
ment of  Florence.  His  mother,  a  girl  of  nineteen  years, 
put  him  out  to  nurse  at  a  country  house  among  the  hills 
of  Settignano,  where  every  other  inhabitant  is  a  worker 
in  the  marble  quarries,  and  the  child  early  became  fa- 
miliar with  that  strange  first  stage  in  the  sculptor's  art. 
To  this  succeeded  the  influence  of  the  sweetest  and  most 
placid  master  Florence  had  yet  seen,  Domenico  Ghir- 
landajo.  At  fifteen  he  was  at  work  among  the  curiosi- 
ties of  the  garden  of  the  Medici,  copying  and  restoring 
antiques,  winning  the  condescending  notice  of  the  great 
Lorenzo.  He  knew,  too,  how  to  excite  strong  hatreds; 
and  it  was  at  this  time  that  in  a  quarrel  with  a  fellow- 
student  he  received  a  blow  on  the  face  which  deprived 
him  for  ever  of  the  comeliness  of  outward  form. 

It  was  through  an  accident  that  he  came  to  study 
those  works  of  the  early  Italian  sculptors  which  sug- 
gested much  of  his  own  grandest  work,  and  impressed 
it  with  so  deep  a  sweetness.  He  believed  in  dreams  and 
omens.  One  of  his  friends  dreamed  twice  that  Lorenzo, 
then  lately  dead,  appeared  to  him  in  grey  and  dusty 
apparel.  To  Michelangelo  this  dream  seemed  to  por- 
tend the  troubles  which  afterwards  really  came,  and  with 


THE  POETRY  OF  MICHELANGELO  65 


the  suddenness  which  was  characteristic  of  all  his  move- 
ments, he  left  Florence.  Having  occasion  to  pass 
through  Bologna,  he  neglected  to  procure  the  little  seal 
of  red  wax  which  the  stranger  entering  Bologna  must 
carry  on  the  thumb  of  his  right  hand.  He  had  no  money 
to  pay  the  fine,  and  would  have  been  thrown  into  prison 
had  not  one  of  the  magistrates  interposed.  He  remained 
in  this  man's  house  a  whole  year,  rewarding  his  hospi- 
tality by  readings  from  the  Italian  poets  whom  he  loved. 
Bologna,  with  its  endless  colonnades  and  fantastic  lean- 
ing towers,  can  never  have  been  one  of  the  lovelier  cities 
of  Italy.  But  about  the  portals  of  its  vast  unfinished 
churches  and  its  dark  shrines,  half  hidden  by  votive 
flowers  and  candles,  lie  some  of  the  sweetest  works  of 
the  early  Tuscan  sculptors,  Giovanni  da  Pisa  and  Jacopo 
della  Quercia,  things  as  winsome  as  flowers ;  and  the  year 
which  Michelangelo  spent  in  copying  these  works  was 
not  a  lost  year.  It  was  now,  on  returning  to  Florence, 
that  he  put  forth  that  unique  presentment  of  Bacchus, 
which  expresses,  not  the  mirthfulness  of  the  god  of 
wine,  but  his  sleepy  seriousness,  his  enthusiasm,  his 
capacity  for  profound  dreaming.  No  one  ever  expressed 
more  truly  than  Michelangelo  the  notion  of  inspired 
sleep,  of  faces  charged  with  dreams.  A  vast  fragment 
of  marble  had  long  lain  below  the  Loggia  of  Orcagna, 
and  many  a  sculptor  had  had  his  thoughts  of  a  design 
which  should  just  fill  this  famous  block  of  stone,  cutting 
the  diamond,  as  it  were,  without  loss.  Under  Michel- 
angelo's hand  it  became  the  David  which  stood  till  lately 
on  the  steps  of  the  Palazzo  Vecchio,  when  it  was  replaced 
below  the  Loggia.  Michelangelo  was  now  thirty  years 
old,  and  his  reputation  was  established.    Three  great 


66 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


works  fill  the  remainder  of  his  life — three  works  often 
interrupted,  carried  on  through  a  thousand  hesitations, 
a  thousand  disappointments,  quarrels  with  his  patrons, 
quarrels  with  his  family,  quarrels  perhaps  most  of  all 
with  himself — the  Sistine  Chapel,  the  Mausoleum  of 
Julius  the  Second,  and  the  Sacristy  of  San  Lorenzo, 

In  the  story  of  Michelangelo's  life  the  strength,  often 
turning  to  bitterness,  is  not  far  to  seek.  A  discordant 
note  sounds  throughout  it  which  almost  spoils  the  music. 
He  "treats  the  Pope  as  the  King  of  France  himself  would 
not  dare  to  treat  him" :  he  goes  along  the  streets  of  Rome 
"like  an  executioner/'  Raphael  says  of  him.  Once  he 
seems  to  have  shut  himself  up  with  the  intention  of 
starving  himself  to  death.  As  we  come,  in  reading  his 
life,  on  its  harsh,  untempered  incidents,  the  thought  again 
and  again  arises  that  he  is  one  of  those  who  incur  the 
judgment  of  Dante,  as  having  "wilfully  lived  in  sadness." 
Even  his  tenderness  and  pity  are  embittered  by  their 
strength.  What  passionate  weeping  in  that  mysterious 
figure  which,  in  the  Creation  of  Adam,  crouches  below 
the  image  of  the  Almighty,  as  he  comes  with  the  forms 
of  things  to  be,  woman  and  her  progeny,  in  the  fold  of 
his  garment !  What  a  sense  of  wrong  in  those  two  cap- 
tive youths,  who  feel  the  chains  like  scalding  water  on 
their  proud  and  delicate  flesh !  The  idealist  who  became 
a  reformer  with  Savonarola,  and  a  republican  superin- 
tending the  fortification  of  Florence — the  nest  where  he 
was  born,  il  nido  ove  naqqu'io,  as  he  calls  it  once,  in  a 
sudden  throb  of  affection — in  its  last  struggle  for  liberty, 
yet  believed  always  that  he  had  imperial  blood  in  his 
veins  and  was  of  the  kindred  of  the  great  Matilda,  had 
within  the  depths  of  his  nature  some  secret  spring  of 


THE  POETRY  OF  MICHELANGELO  67 


indignation  or  sorrow.  We  know  little  of  his  youth,  but 
all  tends  to  make  one  believe  in  the  vehemence  of  its 
passions.  Beneath  the  Platonic  calm  of  the  sonnets 
there  is  latent  a  deep  delight  in  carnal  form  and  color. 
There,  and  still  more  in  the  madrigals,  he  often  falls  into 
the  language  of  less  tranquil  affections;  while  some  of 
them  have  the  color  of  penitence,  as  from  a  wanderer 
returning  home.  He  who  spoke  so  decisively  of  the 
supremacy  in  the  imaginative  world  of  the  unveiled  hu- 
man form  had  not  been  always,  we  may  think,  a  mere 
Platonic  lover.  Vague  and  wayward  his  loves  may  have 
been ;  but  they  partook  of  the  strength  of  his  nature,  and 
sometimes,  it  may  be,  would  by  no  means  become  music, 
so  that  the  comely  order  of  his  days  was  quite  put  out: 
par  che  amaro  ogni  mio  dolce  io  senta. 

But  his  genius  is  in  harmony  with  itself ;  and  just  as 
in  the  products  of  his  art  we  find  resources  of  sweetness 
within  their  exceeding  strength,  so  in  his  own  story  also, 
bitter  as  the  ordinary  sense  of  it  may  be,  there  are  select 
pages  shut  in  among  the  rest — pages  one  might  easily 
turn  over  too  lightly,  but  which  yet  sweeten  the  whole 
volume.  The  interest  of  Michelangelo's  poems  is  that 
they  make  us  spectators  of  this  struggle ;  the  struggle  of 
a  strong  nature  to  adorn  and  attune  itself ;  the  struggle 
of  a  desolating  passion,  which  yearns  to  be  resigned  and 
sweet  and  pensive,  as  Dante's  was.  It  is  a  consequence 
of  the  occasional  and  informal  character  of  his  poetry, 
that  it  brings  us  nearer  to  himself,  his  own  mind  and 
temper,  than  any  work  done  only  to  support  a  literary 
reputation  could  possibly  do.  His  letters  tell  us  little 
that  is  worth  knowing  about  him — a  few  poor  quarrels 
about  money  and  commissions.    But  it  is  quite  other- 


68 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


wise  with  these  songs  and  sonnets,  written  down  at  odd 
moments,  sometimes  on  the  margins  of  his  sketches, 
themselves  often*  unfinished  sketches,  arresting  some 
salient  feeling  or  unpremeditated  idea  as  it  passed.  And 
it  happens  that  a  true  study  of  these  has  become  within 
the  last  few  years  for  the  first  time  possible.  A  few  of 
the  sonnets  circulated  widely  in  manuscript,  and  became 
almost  within  Michelangelo's  own  lifetime  a  subject  of 
academical  discourses.  But  they  were  first  collected  in 
a  volume  in  1623  by  the  great-nephew  of  Michelangelo, 
Michelangelo  Buonarroti  the  younger.  He  omitted  much, 
re-wrote  the  sonnets  in  part,  and  sometimes  com- 
pressed two  or  more  compositions  into  one,  always  los- 
ing something  of  the  force  and  incisiveness  of  the  origi- 
nal. So  the  book  remained,  neglected  even  by  Italians 
themselves  in  the  last  century,  through  the  influence  of 
that  French  taste  which  despised  all  compositions  of 
the  kind,  as  it  despised  and  neglected  Dante.  "His  repu- 
tation will  ever  be  on  the  increase,  because  he  is  so  little 
read/'  says  Voltaire  of  Dante. — But  in  1858  the  last  of 
the  Buonarroti  bequeathed  to  the  municipality  of  Flor- 
ence the  curiosities  of  his  family.  Among  them  was  a 
precious  volume  containing  the  autograph  of  the  son- 
nets. A  learned  Italian,  Signor  Cesare  Guasti,  under- 
took to  collate  this  autograph  with  other  manuscripts  at 
the  Vatican  and  elsewhere,  and  in  1863  published  a  true 
version  of  Michelangelo's  poems,  with  dissertations  and 
a  paraphrase.1 

People  have  often  spoken  of  these  poems  as  if  they 
were  a  mere  cry  of  distress,  a  lover's  complaint  over 

1The  sonnets  have  been  translated  into  English,  with 
much  skill  and  poetic  taste,  by  Mr.  J.  A.  Symonds. 


THE  POETRY  OF  MICHELANGELO  69 


the  obduracy  of  Vittoria  Colonna.  But  those  who  speak 
thus  forget  that  though  it  is  quite  possible  that  Michel- 
angelo had  seen  Vittoria,  that  somewhat  shadowy  figure, 
as  early  as  1537,  yet  their  closer  intimacy  did  not  begin 
till  about  the  year  1542,  when  Michelangelo  was  nearly 
seventy  years  old.  Vittoria  herself,  an  ardent  neo-catho- 
lie,  vowed  to  perpetual  widowhood  since  the  news  had 
reached  her,  seventeen  years  before,  that  her  husband, 
the  youthful  and  princely  Marquess  of  Pescara,  lay  dead 
of  the  wounds  he  had  received  in  the  battle  of  Pavia,  was 
then  no  longer  an  object  of  great  passion.  In  a  dialogue 
written  by  the  painter,  Francesco  d'Ollanda,  we  catch  a 
glimpse  of  them  together  in  an  empty  church  at  Rome, 
one  Sunday  afternoon,  discussing,  indeed,  the  characteris- 
tics of  various  schools  of  art,  but  still  more  the  writings 
of  Saint  Paul,  already  following  the  ways  and  tasting 
the  sunless  pleasures  of  weary  people,  whose  care  for 
external  things  is  slackening.  In  a  letter  still  extant 
he  regrets  that  when  he  visited  her  after  death  he  had 
kissed  her  hands  only.  He  made,  or  set  to  work  to  make, 
a  crucifix  for  her  use,  and  two  drawings,  perhaps  in 
preparation  for  it,  are  now  in  Oxford.  From  allusions 
in  the  sonnets,  we  may  divine  that  when  they  first  ap- 
proached each  other  he  had  debated  much  with  himself 
whether  this  last  passion  would  be  the  most  unsoftening, 
the  most  desolating  of  all — un  dolce  amaro,  un  si  e  no 
mi  muovi.  Is  it  carnal  affection,  or,  del  suo  prestino 
stato  (of  Plato's  ante-natal  state)  il  raggio  ardent e? 
The  older,  conventional  criticism,  dealing  with  the  text 
of  1623,  had  lightly  assumed  that  all,  or  nearly  all,  the 
sonnets  were  actually  addressed  to  Vittoria  herself ;  but 
Signor  Guasti  finds  only  four,  or  at  most  five,  which  can 


7o 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


be  so  attributed  on  genuine  authority.  Still,  there  are 
reasons  which  make  him  assign  the  majority  of  them 
to  the  period  between  1542  and  1547,  and  we  may  regard 
the  volume  as  a  record  of  this  resting-place  in  Michel- 
angelo's story.  We  know  how  Goethe  escaped  from  the 
stress  of  sentiments  too  strong  for  him  by  making  a 
book  about  them;  and  for  Michelangelo,  to  write  down 
his  passionate  thoughts  at  all,  to  express  them  in  a 
sonnet,  was  already  in  some  measure  to  command,  and 
have  his  way  with  them — 

La  vita  del  mia  amor  non  e  il  cor  mio, 
CK  amor,  di  quel  ch3  to  f  amo,  e  senza  core. 

It  was  just  because  Vittoria  raised  no  great  passion  that 
the  space  in  his  life  where  she  reigns  has  such  peculiar 
suavity ;  and  the  spirit  of  the  sonnets  is  lost  if  we  once 
take  them  out  of  that  dreamy  atmosphere  in  which  men 
have  things  as  they  will,  because  the  hold  of  ail  outward 
things  upon  them  is  faint  and  uncertain.  Their  prevail- 
ing tone  is  a  calm  and  meditative  sweetness.  The  cry 
of  distress  is  indeed  there,  but  as  a  mere  residue,  a  trace 
of  bracing  chalybeate  salt,  just  discernible  in  the  song 
which  rises  like  a  clear,  sweet  spring  from  a  charmed 
space  in  his  life. 

This  charmed  and  temperate  space  in  Michelangelo's 
life,  without  which  its  excessive  strength  would  have 
been  so  imperfect,  which  saves  him  from  the  judgment 
of  Dante  on  those  who  "wilfully  lived  in  sadness,"  is 
then  a  well-defined  period  there,  reaching  from  the 
year  1542  to  the  year  1547,  the  year  of  Vittoria's  death. 
In  it  the  lifelong  effort  to  tranquillise  his  vehement 
emotions  by  withdrawing  them  into  the  region  of  ideal 


THE  POETRY  OF  MICHELANGELO  71 


sentiment,  becomes  successful;  and  the  significance  of 
Vittoria  is,  that  she  realises  for  him  a  type  of  affection 
which  even  in  disappointment  may  charm  and  sweeten 
his  spirit. 

In  this  effort  to  tranquillise  and  sweeten  life  by  ideal- 
ising its  vehement  sentiments,  there  were  two  great  tra- 
ditional types,  either  of  which  an  Italian  of  the  six- 
teenth century  might  have  followed.  There  was  Dante, 
whose  little  book  of  the  Vita  Nuova  had  early  become 
a  pattern  of  imaginative  love,  maintained  somewhat 
feebly  by  the  later  followers  of  Petrarch;  and,  since 
Plato  had  become  something  more  than  a  name  in  Italy 
by  the  publication  of  the  Latin  translation  of  his  works 
by  Marsilio  Ficino,  there  was  the  Platonic  tradition  also. 
Dante's  belief  in  the  resurrection  of  the  body,  through 
which,  even  in  heaven,  Beatrice  loses  for  him  no  tinge 
of  flesh-color,  or  fold  of  raiment  even ;  and  the  Platonic 
dream  of  the  passage  of  the  soul  through  one  form  of 
life  after  another,  with  its  passionate  haste  to  escape 
from  the  burden  of  bodily  form  altogether;  are,  for  all 
effects  of  art  or  poetry,  principles  diametrically  opposite. 
Now  it  is  the  Platonic  tradition  rather  than  Dante's  that 
has  molded  Michelangelo's  verse.  In  many  ways  no 
sentiment  could  have  been  less  like  Dante's  love  for 
Beatrice  than  Michelangelo's  for  Vittoria  Colonna. 
Dante's  comes  in  early  youth:  Beatrice  is  a  child,  with 
the  wistful,  ambiguous  vision  of  a  child,  with  a  char- 
acter still  unaccentuated  by  the  influence  of  outward  cir- 
cumstances, almost  expressionless.  Vittoria,  on  the 
other  hand,  is  a  woman  already  weary,  in  advanced  age, 
of  grave  intellectual  qualities.  Dante's  story  is  a  piece 
of  figured  work,  inlaid  with  lovely  incidents.   In  Michel- 


72 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


angelo's  poems,  frost  and  fire  are  almost  the  only  im- 
ages— the  refining  fire  of  the  goldsmith ;  once  or  twice  the 
phoenix;  ice  melting  at  the  fire;  fire  struck  from  the  rock 
which  it  afterwards  consumes.  Except  one  doubtful 
allusion  to  a  journey,  there  are  almost  no  incidents.  But 
there  is  much  of  the  bright,  sharp,  unerring  skill,  with 
which  in  boyhood  he  gave  the  look  of  age  to  the  head 
of  a  faun  by  chipping  a  tooth  from  its  jaw  with  a  single 
stroke  of  the  hammer.  For  Dante,  the  amiable  and  de- 
vout materialism  of  the  middle  age,  sanctifies  all  that  is 
presented  by  hand  and  eye ;  while  Michelangelo  is  always 
pressing  forward  from  the  outward  beauty — il  bel  del 
fuor  che  agli  occhi  place,  to  apprehend  the  unseen 
beauty;  trascenda  nella  forma  universale — that  abstract 
form  of  beauty,  about  which  the  Platonists  reason. 
And  this  gives  the  impression  in  him  of  something  flit- 
Sting  and  unfixed,  of  the  houseless  and  complaining 
spirit,  almost  clairvoyant  through  the  frail  and  yielding 
flesh.  He  accounts  for  love  at  first  sight  by  a  previous 
state  of  existence — la  dove  to  f  amai  prima. 

And  yet  there  are  many  points  in  which  he  is  really 
like  Dante,  and  comes  very  near  to  the  original  image, 
beyond  those  later  and  feebler  followers  in  the  wake  of 
Petrarch.  He  learns  from  Dante  rather  than  from 
Plato,  that  for  lovers,  the  surfeiting  of  desire — ove 
gran  desir  gran  copla  affrena,  is  a  state  less  happy  than 
poverty  with  abundance  of  hope — una  miseria  di  spe- 
ranza  plena.  He  recalls  him  in  the  repetition  of  the 
words  gentile  and  cortesia,  in  the  personification  of 
Amor,  in  the  tendency  to  dwell  minutely  on  the  physical 
effects  of  the  presence  of  a  beloved  object  on  the  pulses 
and  the  heart.    Above  all,  he  resembles  Dante  in  the 


THE  POETRY  OF  MICHELANGELO  73 


warmth  and  intensity  of  his  political  utterances,  for  the 
lady  of  one  of  his  noblest  sonnets  was  from  the  first 
understood  to  be  the  city  of  Florence ;  and  he  avers  that 
all  must  be  asleep  in  heaven,  if  she,  who  was  created 
"of  angelic  form/'  for  a  thousand  lovers,  is  appropri- 
ated by  one  alone,  some  Piero,  or  Alessandro  de'  Medici. 
Once  and  again  he  introduces  Love  and  Death,  who 
dispute  concerning  him.  For,  like  Dante  and  all  the 
nobler  souls  of  Italy,  he  is  much  occupied  with  thoughts 
of  the  grave,  and  his  true  mistress  is  death — death  at 
first  as  the  worst  of  all  sorrows  and  disgraces,  with  a 
clod  of  the  field  for  its  brain;  afterwards,  death  in  its 
high  distinction,  its  detachment  from  vulgar  needs,  the 
angry  stains  of  life  and  action  escaping  fast. 

Some  of  those  whom  the  gods  love  die  young.  This 
man,  because  the  gods  loved  him,  lingered  on  to  be  of 
immense,  patriarchal  age,  till  the  sweetness  it  had  taken 
so  long  to  secrete  in  him  was  found  at  last.  Out  of  the 
strong  came  forth  sweetness,  ex  forti  dulcedo.  The 
world  had  changed  around  him.  The  "new  Catholicism" 
had  taken  the  place  of  the  Renaissance.  The  spirit  of 
the  Roman  Church  had  changed:  in  the  vast  world's 
cathedral  which  his  skill  had  helped  to  raise  for  it,  it 
looked  stronger  than  ever.  Some  of  the  first  members 
of  the  Oratory  were  among  his  intimate  associates. 
They  were  of  a  spirit  as  unlike  as  possible  from  that  of 
Lorenzo,  or  Savonarola  even.  The  opposition  of  the 
Reformation  to  art  has  been  often  enlarged  upon;  far 
greater  was  that  of  the  Catholic  revival.  But  in  thus 
fixing  itself  in  a  frozen  orthodoxy,  the  Roman  Church 
had  passed  beyond  him,  and  he  was  a  stranger  to  it.  In 
earlier  days,  when  its  beliefs  had  been  in  a  fluid  state, 


74 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


! 


he  too  might  have  been  drawn  into  the  controversy. 
He  might  have  been  for  spiritualising  the  papal  sover- 
eignty, like  Savonarola;  or  for  adjusting  the  dreams  of 
Plato  and  Homer  with  the  words  of  Christ,  like  Pico 
of  Mirandola.  But  things  had  moved  onward,  and  such 
adjustments  were  no  longer  possible.  For  himself,  he 
had  long  since  fallen  back  on  that  divine  ideal,  which 
above  the  wear  and  tear  of  creeds  has  been  forming 
itself  for  ages  as  the  possession  of  nobler  souls.  And 
now  he  began  to  feel  the  soothing  influence  which  since 
that  time  the  Roman  Church  has  often  exerted  over 
spirits  too  independent  to  be  its  subjects,  yet  brought 
within  the  neighborhood  of  its  action;  consoled  and 
tranquillised,  as  a  traveller  might  be,  resting  for  one 
evening  in  a  strange  city,  by  its  stately  aspect  and  the 
sentiment  of  its  many  fortunes,  just  because  with  those 
fortunes  he  has  nothing  to  do.  So  he  lingers  on;  a 
revenant,  as  the  French  say,  a  ghost  out  of  another  age, 
in  a  world  too  coarse  to  touch  his  faint  sensibilities  very 
closely;  dreaming,  in  a  worn-out  society,  theatrical  in 
its  life,  theatrical  in  its  art,  theatrical  even  in  its  de- 
votion, on  the  morning  of  the  world's  history,  on  the 
primitive  form  of  man,  on  the  images  under  which  that 
primitive  world  had  conceived  of  spiritual  forces. 

I  have  dwelt  on  the  thought  of  Michelangelo  as  thus 
lingering  beyond  his  time  in  a  world  not  his  own,  be- 
cause, if  one  is  to  distinguish  the  peculiar  savor  of  his 
work,  he  must  be  approached,  not  through  his  followers, 
but  through  his  predecessors;  not  through  the  marbles 
of  Saint  Peter's,  but  through  the  work  of  the  sculptors 
of  the  fifteenth  century  over  the  tombs  and  altars  of 


THE  POETRY  OF  MICHELANGELO  75 


Tuscany.  He  is  the  last  of  the  Florentines,  of  those 
on  whom  the  peculiar  sentiment  of  the  Florence  of 
Dante  and  Giotto  descended:  he  is  the  consummate 
representative  of  the  form  that  sentiment  took  in  the 
fifteenth  century  with  men  like  Luca  Signorelli  and 
Mino  da  Fiesole.  Up  to  him  the  tradition  of  sentiment 
is  unbroken,  the  progress  towards  surer  and  more  mature 
methods  of  expressing  that  sentiment  continuous.  But 
his  professed  disciples  did  not  share  this  temper;  they 
are  in  love  with  his  strength  only,  and  seem  not  to  feel 
his  grave  and  temperate  sweetness.  Theatricality  is  their 
chief  characteristic ;  and  that  is  a  quality  as  little  attribut- 
able to  Michelangelo  as  to  Mino  or  Luca  Signorelli. 
With  him,  as  with  them,  all  is  serious,  passionate,  im- 
pulsive. 

This  discipleship  of  Michelangelo,  this  dependence  of 
his  on  the  tradition  of  the  Florentine  schools,  is  nowhere 
seen  more  clearly  than  in  his  treatment  of  the  Creation. 
The  Creation  of  Man  had  haunted  the  mind  of  the 
middle  age  like  a  dream ;  and  weaving  it  into  a  hundred 
carved  ornaments  of  capital  or  doorway,  the  Italian 
sculptors  had  early  impressed  upon  it  that  pregnancy  of 
expression  which  seems  to  give  it  many  veiled  mean- 
ings. As  with  other  artistic  conceptions  of  the  middle 
age,  its  treatment  became  almost  conventional,  handed 
on  from  artist  to  artist,  with  slight  changes,  till  it  came 
to  have  almost  an  independent  and  abstract  existence  of 
its  own.  It  was  characteristic  of  the  medieval  mind  thus 
to  give  an  independent  traditional  existence  to  a  special 
pictorial  conception,  or  to  a  legend,  like  that  of  Tristram 
or  Tannhauser,  or  even  to  the  very  thoughts  and  sub- 
stance of  a  book;  like  the  Imitation,  so  that  no  single 


76  THE  RENAISSANCE 

workman  could  claim  it  as  his  own,  and  the  book,  the  im- 
age, the  legend,  had  itself  a  legend,  and  its  fortunes,  and 
a  personal  history;  and  it  is  a  sign  of  the  medievalism 
of  Michelangelo,  that  he  thus  receives  from  tradition 
his  central  conception,  and  does  but  add  the  last  touches, 
in  transferring  it  to  the  frescoes  of  the  Sistine  Chapel. 

But  there  was  another  tradition  of  those  earlier,  more 
serious  Florentines,  of  which  Michelangelo  is  the  inherit- 
or, to  which  he  gives  the  final  expression,  and  which 
centres  in  the  sacristy  of  San  Lorenzo,  as  the  tradition 
of  the  Creation  centres  in  the  Sistine  Chapel.  It  has 
been  said  that  all  the  great  Florentines  were  preoccupied 
with  death.  Outre-tombe!  Outre-tombe! — is  the  bur- 
den of  their  thoughts,  from  Dante  to  Savonarola.  Even 
the  gay  and  licentious  Boccaccio  gives  a  keener  edge  to 
his  stories  by  putting  them  in  the  mouths  of  a  party  of 
people  who  had  taken  refuge  in  a  country-house  from 
the  danger  of  death  by  plague.  It  was  to  this  inherited 
sentiment,  this  practical  decision  that  to  be  preoccupied 
with  the  thought  of  death  was  in  itself  dignifying,  and 
a  note  of  high  quality,  that  the  seriousness  of  the  great 
Florentines  of  the  fifteenth  century  was  partly  due;  and 
it  was  reinforced  in  them  by  the  actual  sorrows  of  their 
times.  How  often,  and  in  what  various  ways,  had  they 
seen  life  stricken  down,  in  their  streets  .and  houses. 
La  bella  Simonetta  dies  in  early  youth,  and  is  borne 
to  the  grave  with  uncovered  face.  The  young  Cardinal 
Jacopo  di  Portogallo  dies  on  a  visit  to  Florence — insig- 
nis  forma  fui  et  mirabili  modestia — his  epitaph  dares  to 
say.  Antonio  Rossellino  carves  his  tomb  in  the  church 
of  San  Miniato,  with  care  for  the  shapely  hands  and 
feet,  and  sacred  attire;  Luca  della  Robbia  puts  his  sky- 

7 


THE  POETRY  OF  MICHELANGELO  77 


iest  works  there;  and  the  tomb  of  the  youthful  and 
princely  prelate  became  the  strangest  and  most  beautiful 
thing  in  that  strange  and  beautiful  place.  After  the 
execution  of  the  Pazzi  conspirators,  Botticelli  is  em- 
ployed to  paint  their  portraits.  This  preoccupation  with 
serious  thoughts  and  sad  images  might  easily  have  re- 
sulted, as  it  did,  for  instance,  in  the  gloomy  villages  of 
the  Rhine,  or  in  the  overcrowded  parts  of  medieval 
Paris,  as  it  still  does  in  many  a  village  of  the  Alps,  in 
something  merely  morbid  or  grotesque,  in  the  Danse 
Macabre  of  many  French  and  German  painters,  or  the 
grim  inventions  of  Durer.  From  such  a  result  the  Flor- 
entine masters  of  the  fifteenth  century  were  saved  by 
the  nobility  of  their  Italian  culture,  and  still  more  by 
their  tender  pity  for  the  thing  itself.  They  must  often 
have  leaned  over  the  lifeless  body,  when  all  was  at 
length  quiet  and  smoothed  out.  After  death,  it  is  said, 
the  traces  of  slighter  and  more  superficial  dispositions 
disappear;  the  lines  become  more  simple  and  dignified; 
only  the  abstract  lines  remain,  in  a  great  indifference. 
They  came  thus  to  see  death  in  its  distinction.  Then 
following  it  perhaps  one  stage  further,  dwelling  for  a 
moment  on  the  point  where  all  this  transitory  dignity 
must  break  up,  and  discerning  with  no  clearness  a  new 
body,  they  paused  just  in  time,  and  abstained,  with  a 
sentiment  of  profound  pity. 

Of  all  this  sentiment  Michelangelo  is  the  achievement; 
and,  first  of  all,  of  pity.  Pieta,  pity,  the  pity  of  the  Vir- 
gin Mother  over  the  dead  body  of  Christ,  expanded  into 
the  pity  of  all  mothers  over  all  dead  sons,  the  entomb- 
ment, with  its  cruel  "hard  stones": — this  is  the  subject 
of  his  predilection.    He  has  left  it  in  many  forms, 


78 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


sketches,  half-finished  designs,  finished  and  unfinished 
groups  of  sculpture;  but  always  as  a  hopeless,  rayless, 
almost  heathen  sorrow — no  divine  sorrow,  but  mere  pity 
and  awe  at  the  stiff  limbs  and  colorless  lips.  There  is 
a  drawing  of  his  at  Oxford,  in  which  the  dead  body  has 
sunk  to  the  earth  between  the  mother's  feet,  with  the 
arms  extended  over  her  knees.  The  tombs  in  the  sacristy 
of  San  Lorenzo  are  memorials,  not  of  any  of  the  nobler 
and  greater  Medici,  but  of  Giuliano,  and  Lorenzo  the 
younger,  noticeable  chiefly  for  their  somewhat  early 
death.  It  is  mere  human  nature,  therefore,  which  has 
prompted  the  sentiment  here.  The  titles  assigned  tra- 
ditionally to  the  four  symbolical  figures,  Night  and  Day, 
The  Twilight  and  The  Dawn,  are  far  too  definite  for 
them;  for  these  figures  come  much  nearer  to  the  mind 
and  spirit  of  their  author,  and  are  a  more  direct  ex- 
pression of  his  thoughts,  than  any  merely  symbolical 
conceptions  could  possibly  have  been.  They  concentrate 
and  express,  less  by  way  of  definite  conceptions  than  by 
the  touches,  the  promptings  of  a  piece  of  music,  all  those 
vague  fancies,  misgivings,  presentiments,  which  shift 
and  mix  and  are  defined  and  fade  again,  whenever  the 
thoughts  try  to  fix  themselves  with  sincerity  on  the  con- 
ditions and  surroundings  of  the  disembodied  spirit.  I 
suppose  no  one  would  come  to  the  sacristy  of  San  Lo- 
renzo for  consolation ;  for  seriousness,  for  solemnity,  for 
dignity  of  impression,  perhaps,  but  not  for  consolation. 
It  is  a  place  neither  of  consoling  nor  of  terrible  thoughts, 
but  of  vague  and  wistful  speculation.  Here,  again, 
Michelangelo  is  the  disciple  not  so  much  of  Dante  as 
of  the  Platonists.  Dante's  belief  in  immortality  is  for- 
mal, precise  and  firm,  almost  as  much  so  as  that  of  a 


THE  POETRY  OF  MICHELANGELO  79 


child,  who  thinks  the  dead  will  hear  if  you  cry  loud 
enough.  But  in  Michelangelo  you  have  maturity,  the 
mind  of  the  grown  man,  dealing  cautiously  and  dispas- 
sionately with  serious  things,  and  what  hope  he  has  is 
based  on  the  consciousness  of  ignorance — ignorance  of 
man,  ignorance  of  the  nature  of  the  mind,  its  origin  and 
capacities.  Michelangelo  is  so  ignorant  of  the  spiritual 
world,  of  the  new  body  and  its  laws,  that  he  does  not 
surely  know  whether  the  consecrated  Host  may  not  be 
the  body  of  Christ.  And  of  all  that  range  of  sentiment 
he  is  the  poet,  a  poet  still  alive,  and  in  possession  of  our 
inmost  thoughts — dumb  inquiry  over  the  relapse  after 
death  into  the  formlessness  which  preceded  life,  the 
change,  the  revolt  from  that  change,  then  the  correcting, 
hallowing,  consoling  rush  of  pity;  at  last,  far  off,  thin 
and  vague,  yet  not  more  vague  than  the  most  definite 
thoughts  men  have  had  through  three  centuries  on  a 
matter  that  has  been  so  near  their  hearts,  the  new  body 
— a  passing  light,  a  mere  intangible,  external  effect,  over 
those  too  rigid,  or  too  formless  faces;  a  dream  that 
lingers  a  moment,  retreating  in  the  dawn,  incomplete, 
aimless,  helpless ;  a  thing  with  faint  hearing,  faint  mem- 
ory, faint  power  of  touch ;  a  breath,  a  flame  in  the  door- 
way, a  feather  in  the  wind. 

The  qualities  of  the  great  masters  in  art  or  literature, 
the  combination  of  those  qualities,  the  laws  by  which 
they  moderate,  support,  relieve  each  other,  are  not  pe- 
culiar to  them;  but  most  often  typical  standards,  or  re- 
vealing instances  of  the  laws  by  which  certain  aesthetic 
effects  are  produced.  The  old  masters  indeed  are  sim- 
pler; their  characteristics  are  written  larger,  and  are 
easier  to  read,  than  the  analogues  of  them  in  all  th<* 


80  THE  RENAISSANCE 

mixed,  confused  productions  of  the  modern  mind.  But 
when  once  we  have  succeeded  in  defining  for  ourselves 
those  characteristics,  and  the  law  of  their  combination, 
we  have  acquired  a  standard  or  measure  which  helps  us 
to  put  in  its  right  place  many  a  vagrant  genius,  many 
an  unclassified  talent,  many  precious  though  imperfect 
products  of  art.  It  is  so  with  the  components  of  the 
true  character  of  Michelangelo.  That  strange  interfu- 
sion of  sweetness  and  strength  is  not  to  be  found  in 
those  who  claimed  to  be  his  followers;  but  it  is  found 
in  many  of  those  who  worked  before  him,  and  in  many 
others  down  to  our  own  time,  in  William  Blake,  for  in- 
stance, and  Victor  Hugo,  who,  though  not  of  his  school, 
and  unaware,  are  his  true  sons,  and  help  us  to  understand 
him  as  he  in  turn  interprets  and  justifies  them.  Per- 
haps this  is  the  chief  use  in  studying  old  masters. 

1871. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


HOMO  MINISTER  ET  INTERPRES  NATURE 

In  Vasari's  life  of  Leonardo  da  Vinci  as  we  now 
read  it  there  are  some  variations  from  the  first  edition. 
There,  the  painter  who  has  fixed  the  outward  type  of 
Christ  for  succeeding  centuries  was  a  bold  speculator, 
holding  lightly  by  other  men's  beliefs,  setting  philoso- 
phy above  Christianity.  Words  of  his,  trenchant  enough 
to  justify  this  impression,  are  not  recorded,  and  would 
have  been  out  of  keeping  with  a  genius  of  which  one 
characteristic  is  the  tendency  to  lose  itself  in  a  refined 
and  graceful  mystery.  The  suspicion  was  but  the  time- 
honored  mode  in  which  the  world  stamps  its  apprecia- 
tion of  one  who  has  thoughts  for  himself  alone,  his 
high  indifference,  his  intolerance  of  the  common  forms 
of  things ;  and  in  the  second  edition  the  image  was 
changed  into  something  fainter  and  more  conventional. 
But  it  is  still  by  a  certain  mystery  in  his  work,  and  some- 
thing enigmatical  beyond  the  usual  measure  of  great 
men,  that  he  fascinates,  or  perhaps  half  repels.  His  life 
is  one  of  sudden  revolts,  with  intervals  in  which  he  works 
not  at  all,  or  apart  from  the  main  scope  of  his  work. 
By  a  strange  fortune  the  pictures  on  which  his  more 
popular  fame  rested  disappeared  early  from  the  world, 
like  the  Battle  of  the  Standard;  or  are  mixed  obscurely 
with  the  product  of  meaner  hands,  like  the  Last  Suppef. 

81 


82 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


.His  type  of  beauty  is  so  exotic  that  it  fascinates  a  larger 
number  than  it  delights,  and  seems  more  than  that  of 
•any  other  artist  to  reflect  ideas  and  views  and  some 
scheme  of  the  world  within;  so  that  he  seemed  to  his 
contemporaries  to  be  the  possessor  of  some  unsancti- 
fied  and  secret  wisdom;  as  to  Michelet  and  others  to 
have  anticipated  modern  ideas.  He  trifles  with  his 
genius,  and  crowds  all  his  chief  work  into  a  few  tor- 
mented years  of  later  life ;  yet  he  is  so  possessed  by  his 
genius  that  he  passes  unmoved  through  the  most  tragic 
events,  overwhelming  his  country  and  friends,  like  one 
who  comes  across  them  by  chance  on  some  secret  er- 
rand. 

His  legend,  as  the  French  say,  with  the  anecdotes 
which  every  one  remembers,  is  one  of  the  most  brilliant 
chapters  of  Vasari.  Later  writers  merely  copied  it,  un- 
til, in  1894,  Carlo  Amoretti  applied  to  it  a  criticism 
which  left  hardly  a  date  fixed,  and  not  one  of  those  an- 
ecdotes untouched.  The  various  questions  thus  raised 
have  since  that  time  become,  one  after  another,  subjects 
of  special  study,  and  mere  antiquarianism  has  in  this 
direction  little  more  to  do.  For  others  remain  the  edit- 
ing of  the  thirteen  books  of  his  manuscripts,  and  the 
separation  by  technical  criticism  of  what  in  his  reputed 
works  is  really  his,  from  what  is  only  half  his,  or  the 
work  of  his  pupils.  But  a  lover  of  strange  souls  may 
still  analyse  for  himself  the  impression  made  on  him  by 
those  works,  and  try  to  reach  through  it  a  definition  of 
the  chief  elements  of  Leonardo's  genius.  The  legend, 
as  corrected  and  enlarged  by  its  critics,  may  now  and 
then  intervene  to  support  the  results  of  this  analysis. 

His  life  has  three  divisions — thirty  years  at  Florence, 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


83 


nearly  twenty  years  at  Milan,  then  nineteen  years  of 
wandering,  till  he  sinks  to  rest  under  the  protection  of 
Francis  the  First  at  the  Chateau  de  Clou.  The  dis- 
honor of  illegitimacy  hangs  over  his  birth.  Piero 
Antonio,  his  father,  was  of  a  noble  Florentine  house,  of 
Vinci  in  the  Val  d'Arno,  and  Leonardo,  brought  up  deli- 
cately among  the  true  children  of  that  house,  was  the 
love-child  of  his  youth,  wit  hthe  keen,  puissant  nature 
such  children  often  have.  We  see  him  in  his  boyhood 
fascinating  all  men  by  his  beauty,  improvising  music 
and  songs,  buying  the  caged  birds  and  setting  them  free, 
as  he  walked  the  streets  of  Florence,  fond  of  odd  bright 
dresses  and  spirited  horses. 

From  his  earliest  years  he  designed  many  objects, 
and  constructed  models  in  relief,  of  which  Vasari  men- 
tions some  of  women  smiling.  His  father,  pondering 
over  this  promise  in  the  child,  took  him  to  the  workshop 
of  Andrea  del  Verrocchio,  then  the  most  famous  artist 
in  Florence.  Beautiful  objects  lay  about  there — reli- 
quaries, pyxes,  silver  images  for  the  pope's  chapel  at 
Rome,  strange  fancy-work  of  the  middle  age,  keeping 
odd  company  with  fragments  of  antiquity,  then  but  lately 
discovered.  Another  student  Leonardo  may  have  seen 
there — a  lad  into  whose  soul  the  level  light  and  aerial 
illusions  of  Italian  sunsets  had  passed,  in  after  days  fa- 
mous as  Perugino.  Verrocchio  was  an  artist  of  the 
earlier  Florentine  type,  carver,  painter,  and  worker  in 
metals,  in  one ;  designer,  not  of  pictures  only,  but  of  all 
things  for  sacred  or  household  use,  drinking-vessels, 
ambries,  instruments  of  music,  making  them  all  fair  to 
taok  upon,  filling  the  common  ways  of  life  with  the 
reflection  of  some  far-off  brightness;  and  years  of  pa- 


84 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


tience  had  refined  his  hand  till  his  work  was  now  sought 
after  from  distant  places. 

It  happened  that  Verrocchio  was  employed  by  the 
brethren  of  Vallombrosa  to  paint  the  Baptism  of  Christ, 
and  Leonardo  was  allowed  to  finish  an  angel  in  the  left- 
hand  corner.  It  was  one  of  those  moments  in  which  the 
progress  of  a  great  thing — here,  that  of  the  art  of  Italy — 
presses  hard  on  the  happiness  of  an  individual,  through 
whose  discouragement  and  decrease,  humanity,  in  more 
fortunate  persons,  comes  a  step  nearer  to  its  final  suc- 
cess. 

For  beneath  the  cheerful  exterior  of  the  mere  well- 
paid  craftsman,  chasing  brooches  for  the  copes  of  Santa 
Maria  Novella,  or  twisting  metal  screens  for  the  tombs 
of  the  Medici,  lay  the  ambitious  desire  to  expand  the 
destiny  of  Italian  art  by  a  larger  knowledge  and  insight 
into  things,  a  purpose  in  art  not  unlike  Leonardo's  still 
unconscious  purpose;  and  often,  in  the  modelling  of 
drapery,  or  of  a  lifted  arm,  or  of  hair  cast  back  from 
the  face,  there  came  to  him  something  of  the  freer 
manner  and  richer  humanity  of  a  later  age.  But  in  this 
Baptism  the  pupil  had  surpassed  the  master;  and  Ver- 
rocchio turned  away  as  one  stunned,  and  as  if  his  sweet 
earlier  work  must  thereafter  be  distasteful  to  him,  from 
the  bright  animated  angel  of  Leonardo's  hand. 

The  angel  may  still  be  seen  in  Florence,  a  space  of 
sunlight  in  the  cold,  labored  old  picture ;  but  the  legend 
is  true  only  in  sentiment,  for  painting  had  always  been 
the  art  by  which  Verrocchio  set  least  store.  And  as  in 
a  sense  he  anticipates  Leonardo,  so  to  the  last  Leonardo 
recalls  the  studio  of  Verrocchio,  in  the  love  of  beautiful 
toys,  such  as  the  vessel  of  water  for  a  mirror,  and  lovely 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


needle-work  about  the  implicated  hands  in  the  Modesty 
and  Vanity,  and  of  reliefs,  like  those  cameos  which  in 
the  Virgin  of  the  Balances  hang  all  round  the  girdle 
of  Saint  Michael,  and  of  bright  variegated  stones,  such 
as  the  agates  in  the  Saint  Anne,  and  in  a  hieratic  precise- 
ness  and  grace,  as  of  a  sanctuary  swept  and  garnished* 
Amid  all  the  cunning  and  intricacy  of  his  Lombard  man- 
ner this  never  left  him.  Much  of  it  there  must  have 
been  in  that  lost  picture  of  Paradise,  which  he  prepared 
as  a  cartoon  for  tapestry,  to  be  woven  in  the  looms  of 
Flanders.  It  was  the  perfection  of  the  older  Floren-* 
tine  style  of  miniature-painting,  with  patient  putting  of 
each  leaf  upon  the  trees  and  each  flower  in  the  grass,, 
where  the  first  man  and  woman  were  standing. 

And  because  it  was  the  perfection  of  that  style,  it 
awoke  in  Leonardo  some  seed  of  discontent  which  lay 
in  the  secret  places  of  his  nature.  For  the  way  to  per- 
fection is  through  a  series  of  disgusts;  and  this  picture 
— all  that  he  had  done  so  far  in  his  life  at  Florence — • 
was  after  all  in  the  old  slight  manner.  His  art,  if  it 
was  to  be  something  in  the  world,  must  be  weighted 
with  more  of  the  meaning  of  nature  and  purpose  of  hu- 
manity. Nature  was  "the  true  mistress  of  higher  intel- 
ligences.,,  He  plunged,  then,  into  the  study  of  nature. 
And  in  doing  this  he  followed  the  manner  of  the  older 
students;  he  brooded  over  the  hidden  virtues  of  plants 
and  crystals,  the  lines  traced  by  the  stars  as  they  moved 
in  the  sky,  over  the  correspondences  which  exist  between 
the  different  orders  of  living  things,  through  which,  to 
eyes  opened,  they  interpret  each  other;  and  for  years 
he  seemed  to  those  about  him  as  one  listening  to  a  voW\ 
silent  for  other  men. 


86 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


He  learned  here  the  art  of  going  deep,  of  tracking 
the  sources  of  expression  to  their  subtlest  retreats,  the 
power  of  an  intimate  presence  in  the  things  he  handled. 
He  did  not  at  once  or  entirely  desert  his  art;  only  he 
was  no  longer  the  cheerful,  objective  painter,  through 
whose  soul,  as  through  clear  glass,  the  bright  figures  of 
Florentine  life,  only  made  a  little  mellower  and  more 
pensive  by  the  transit,  passed  on  to  the  white  wall.  He 
wasted  many  days  in  curious  tricks  of  design,  seeming 
to  lose  himself  in  the  spinning  of  intricate  devises  of 
line  and  color.  He  was  smitten  with  a  love  of  the  im- 
possible— the  perforation  of  mountains,  changing  the 
course  of  rivers,  raising  great  buildings,  such  as  the 
church  of  San  Giovanni,  in  the  air;  all  those  feats 
for  the  performance  of  which  natural  magic  professed 
to  have  the  key.  Later  writers,  indeed,  see  in  these  ef- 
forts an  anticipation  of  modern  mechanics ;  in  him  they 
were  rather  dreams,  thrown  off  by  the  overwrought  and 
laboring  brain.  Two  ideas  were  especially  confirmed 
in  him,  as  reflexes  of  things  that  had  touched  his  brain 
in  childhood  beyond  the  depth  of  other  impressions — the 
smiling  of  women  and  the  motion  of  great  waters. 

And  in  such  studies  some  interfusion  of  the  extremes 
of  beauty  and  terror  shaped  itself,  as  an  image  that 
might  be  seen  and  touched,  in  the  mind  of  this  gracious 
youth,  so  fixed  that  for  the  rest  of  his  life  it  never  left 
him.  As  if  catching  glimpses  of  it  in  the  strange  eyes 
or  hair  of  chance  people,  he  would  follow  such  about 
the  streets  of  Florence  till  the  sun  went  down,  of  whom 
many  sketches  of  his  remain.  Some  of  these  are  full 
of  a  curious  beauty,  that  remote  beauty  which  may  be 
apprehended  only  by  those  who  have  sought  it  care- 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


87 


fully;  who,  starting  with  acknowledged  types  of  beauty, 
have  refined  as  far  upon  these,  as  these  refine  upon  the 
world  of  common  forms.  But  mingled  inextricably  with 
this  there  is  an  element  of  mockery  also ;  so  that,  whether 
in  sorrow  or  scorn,  he  caricatures  Dante  even.  Legions 
of  grotesques  sweep  under  his  hand ;  for  has  not  nature, 
too,  her  grotesques — the  rent  rock,  the  distorting  lights 
of  evening  on  lonely  roads,  the  unveiled  structure  of 
man  in  the  embryo,  or  the  skeleton  ? 

All  these  swarming  fancies  unite  in  the  Medusa  of 
the  Ufhzii.  Vasari's  story  of  an  earlier  Medusa,  painted 
on  a  wooden  shield,  is  perhaps  an  invention;  and  yet, 
properly  told,  has  more  of  the  air  of  truth  about  it  than 
anything  else  in  the  whole  legend.  For  its  real  subject 
is  not  the  serious  work  of  a  man,  but  the  experiment  of 
a  child.  The  lizards  and  glow-worms  and  other  strange 
small  creatures  which  haunt  an  Italian  vineyard  bring 
before  one  the  whole  picture  of  a  child's  life  in  a  Tus- 
can dwelling — half  castle,  half  farm — and  are  as  true 
to  nature  as  the  pretended  astonishment  of  the  father 
for  whom  the  boy  has  prepared  a  surprise.  It  was  not 
in  play  that  he  painted  that  other  Medusa,  the  one  great 
picture  which  he  left  behind  him  in  Florence.  The  sub- 
ject has  been  treated  in  various  ways;  Leonardo  alone 
cuts  to  its  centre;  he  alone  realises  it  as  the  head  of  a 
corpse,  exercising  its  powers  through  all  the  circum- 
stances of  death.  What  may  be  called  the  fascination 
of  corruption  penetrates  in  every  touch  its  exquisitely 
finished  beauty.  About  the  dainty  lines  of  the  cheek  the 
bat  flits  unheeded.  The  delicate  snakes  seem  literally 
strangling  each  other  in  terrified  struggle  to  escape  from 
the  Medusa  brain.    The  hue  which  violent  death  always 


88 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


brings  with  it  is  in  the  features;  features  singularly 
massive  and  grand,  as  we  catch  them  inverted,  in  a  dex- 
terous foreshortening,  crown  foremost,  like  a  great  calm 
stone  against  which  the  wave  of  serpents  breaks. 

The  science  of  that  age  was  all  divination,  clairvoy- 
ance, unsubjected  to  our  exact  modern  formulas,  seeking 
in  an  instant  of  vision  to  concentrate  a  thousand  experi- 
ences. Later  writers,  thinking  only  of  the  well-ordered 
treatise  on  painting  which  a  Frenchman,  Raffaelle  du 
Fresne,  a  hundred  years  afterwards,  compiled  from 
Leonardo's  bewildered  manuscripts,  written  strangely, 
as  his  manner  was,  from  right  to  left,  have  imagined  a 
rigid  order  in  his  inquiries.  But  this  rigid  order  would 
have  been  little  in  accordance  with  the  restlessness  of 
his  character ;  and  if  we  think  of  him  as  the  mere  rea- 
soner  who  subjects  design  to  anatomy,  and  composition 
to  mathematical  rules,  we  shall  hardly  have  that  im- 
pression which  those  around  Leonardo  received  from 
him.  Poring  over  his  crucibles,  making  experiments 
with  color,  trying,  by  a  strange  variation  of  the  alche- 
mist's dream,  to  discover  the  secret,  not  of  an  elixir  to 
make  man's  natural  life  immortal,  but  of  giving  immor- 
tality to  the  subtlest  and  most  delicate  effects  of  paint- 
ing, he  seemed  to  them  rather  the  sorcerer  or  the  ma- 
gician, possessed  of  curious  secrets  and  a  hidden  knowl- 
edge, living  in  a  world  of  which  he  alone  possessed  the 
key.  What  his  philosophy  seems  to  have  been  most 
like  is  that  of  Paracelsus  or  Cardan;  and  much  of  the 
spirit  of  the  older  alchemy  still  hangs  about  it,  with 
its  confidence  in  short  cuts  and  odd  byways  to  knowl- 
edge. To  him  philosophy  was  to  be  something  giving 
strange  swiftness  and  double  sight,  divining  the  sources 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


89 


of  springs  beneath  the  earth  or  of  expression  beneath 
the  human  countenance,  clairvoyant  of  occult  gifts  in 
common  or  uncommon  things,  in  the  reed  at  the  brook- 
side,  or  the  star  which  draws  near  to  us  but  once  in  a 
century.  How,  in  this  way,  the  clear  purpose  was  over- 
clouded, the  fine  chaser's  hand  perplexed,  we  but  dimly 
see;  the  mystery  which  at  no  point  quite  lifts  from  Leon- 
ardo's life  is  deepest  here.  But  it  is  certain  that  at  one 
period  of  his  life  he  had  almost  ceased  to  be  an  artist. 

The  year  1483 — the  year  of  the  birth  of  Raphael  and 
the  thirty-first  of  Leonardo's  life — is  fixed  as  the  date 
of  his  visit  to  Milan  by  the  letter  in  which  he  recom- 
mends himself  to  Ludovico  Sforza,  and  offers  to  tell 
him,  for  a  price,  strange  secrets  in  the  art  of  war.  It 
was  that  Sforza  who  murdered  his  young  nephew  by 
slow  poison,  yet  was  so  susceptible  of  religious  impres- 
sions that  he  blended  mere  earthly  passion  with  a  sort 
of  religious  sentimentalism,  and  who  took  for  his  device 
the  mulberry-tree — symbol,  in  its  long  delay  and  sudden 
yielding  of  flowers  and  fruit  together,  of  a  wisdom  which 
economises  all  forces  for  an  opportunity  of  sudden  and 
sure  effect.  The  fame  of  Leonardo  had  gone  before  him, 
and  he  was  to  model  a  colossal  statue  of  Francesco,  the 
first  Duke  of  Milan.  As  for  Leonardo  himself,  he  came 
not  as  an  artist  at  all,  or  careful  of  the  fame  of  one;  but 
as  a  player  on  the  harp,  a  strange  harp  of  silver  of  his 
own  construction,  shaped  in  some  curious  likeness  to 
a  horse's  skull.  The  capricious  spirit  of  Ludovico  was 
susceptible  also  to  the  power  of  music,  and  Leonardo's 
nature  had  a  kind  of  spell  in  it.  Fascination  is  always 
the  word  descriptive  of  him.  No  portrait  of  his  youth 
remains ;  but  all  tends  to  make  us  believe  that  up  to  this 


9Q 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


time  some  charm  of  voice  and  aspect,  strong  enough  to 
balance  the  disadvantage  of  his  birth,  had  played  about 
him.  His  physical  strength  was  great;  it  was  said  that 
he  could  bend  a  horseshoe  like  a  coil  of  lead. 

The  Duonto,  work  of  artists  from  beyond  the  Alps, 
so  fantastic  to  the  eye  of  a  Florentine  used  to  the  mel- 
low, unbroken  surfaces  of  Giotto  and  Arnolfo,  was  then 
in  all  its  freshness;  and  below,  in  the  streets  of  Milan, 
moved  a  people  as  fantastic,  changeful,  and  dreamlike. 
To  Leonardo  least  of  all  men  could  there  be  anything 
poisonous  in  the  exotic  flowers  of  sentiment  which  grew 
there.  It  was  a  life  of  brilliant  sins  and  exquisite  amuse- 
ments: Leonardo  became  a  celebrated  designer  of  pa- 
geants ;  and  it  suited  the  quality  of  his  genius,  composed, 
in  almost  equal  parts,  of  curiosity  and  the  desire  of 
beauty,  to  take  things  as  they  came. 

Curiosity  and  the  desire  of  beauty — these  are  the  two 
elementary  forces  in  Leonardo's  genius;  curiosity,  often 
in  conflict  with  the  desire  of  beauty,  but  generating,  in 
union  with  it,  a  type  of  subtle  and  curious  grace. 

The  movement  of  the  fifteenth  century  was  twofold; 
partly  the  Renaissance,  partly  also  the  coming  of  what 
is  called  the  "modern  spirit,"  with  its  realism,  its  ap- 
peal to  experience.  It  comprehended  a  return  to  an- 
tiquity, and  a  return  to  nature.  Raphael  represents  the 
return  to  antiquity,  and  Leonardo  the  return  to  nature.  In 
this  return  to  nature,  he  was  seeking  to  satisfy  a  bound- 
less curiosity  by  her  perpetual  surprises,  a  microscopic 
sense  of  finish  by  her  finesse,  or  delicacy  of  operation, 
that  subtilitas  naturae  which  Bacon  notices.  So  we  find 
him  often  in  intimate  relations  with  men  of  science, — 
with  Fra  Luca  Paccioli  the  mathematician,  and  the 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


9i 


anatomist  Marc  Antonio  della  Torre.  His  observations 
and  experiments  fill  thirteen  volumes  of  manuscript; 
and  those  who  can  judge  describe  him  as  anticipating 
long  before,  by  rapid  intuition,  the  later  ideas  of  science. 
He  explained  the  obscure  light  of  the  unilluminated  part 
of  the  moon,  knew  that  the  sea  had  once  covered  the 
mountains  which  contain  shells,  and  of  the  gathering  of 
the  equatorial  waters  above  the  polar. 

He  who  thus  penetrated  into  the  most  secret  parts  of 
nature  preferred  always  the  more  to  the  less  remote, 
what,  seeming  exceptional,  was  an  instance  of  law  more 
refined,  the  construction  about  things  of  a  peculiar  at- 
mosphere and  mixed  lights.  He  paints  flowers  with  such 
curious  felicity  that  different  writers  have  attributed  to 
him  a  fondness  for  particular  flowers,  as  Clement  the 
cyclamen,  and  Rio  the  jasmin;  while,  at  Venice,  there 
is  a  stray  leaf  from  his  portfolio  dotted  all  over  with 
studies  of  violets  and  the  wild  rose.  In  him  first  appears 
the  taste  for  what  is  bizarre  or  recherche  in  landscape ; 
hollow  places  full  of  the  green  shadow  of  bituminous 
rocks,  ridged  reefs  of  trap-rock  which  cut  the  water  into 
quaint  sheets  of  light, — their  exact  antitype  is  in  our 
own  western  seas ;  all  the  solemn  effects  of  moving 
water.  You  may  follow  it  springing  from  its  distant 
source  among  the  rocks  on  the  heath  of  the  Madonna 
of  the  Balances,  passing,  as  a  little  fall,  into  the  treach- 
erous calm  of  the  Madonna  of  the  Lake,  as  a  goodly 
river  next,  below  the  cliffs  of  the  Madonna  of  the  Rocks, 
washing  the  white  walls  of  its  distant  villages,  stealing 
out  in  a  network  of  divided  streams  in  La  Gioconda  to 
the  seashore  of  the  Saint  Anne — that  delicate  place, 
where  the  wind  passes  like  the  hand  of  some  fine  etcher 


92 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


over  the  surface,  and  the  untorn  shells  are  lying  thick 
upon  the  sand,  and  the  tops  of  the  rocks,  to  which  the 
waves  never  rise,  are  green  with  grass,  grown  fine  as 
hair.  It  is  the  landscape,  not  of  dreams  or  of  fancy, 
but  of  places  far  withdrawn,  and  hours  selected  from  a 
thousand  with  a  miracle  of  finesse.  Through  Leonardo's 
strange  veil  of  sight  things  reach  him  so ;  in  no  ordinary 
night  or  day,  but  as  in  faint  light  of  eclipse,  or  in  some 
brief  interval  of  falling  rain  at  daybreak,  or  through 
deep  water. 

And  not  into  nature  only;  but  he  plunged  also  into 
human  personality,  and  became  above  all  a  painter  of 
portraits;  faces  of  a  modelling  more  skilful  than  has 
been  seen  before  or  since,  embodied  with  a  reality  which 
almost  amounts  to  illusion,  on  the  dark  air.  To  take  a 
character  as  it  was,  and  delicately  sound  its  stops,  suited 
one  so  curious  in  observation,  curious  in  invention.  He 
painted  thus  the  portraits  of  Ludovico's  mistresses,  Lu- 
cretia  Crivelli  and  Cecilia  Galerani  the  poetess,  of  Lu- 
dovico  himself,  and  the  Duchess  Beatrice.  The  portrait 
of  Cecilia  Galerani  is  lost,  but  that  of  Lucretia  Crivelli 
has  been  identified  with  La  Belle  Feroniere  of  the 
Louvre,  and  Ludovico's  pale,  anxious  face  still  remains 
in  the  Ambrosian  library.  Opposite  is  the  portrait  of 
Beatrice  d'Este,  in  whom  Leonardo  seems  to  have  caught 
some  presentiment  of  early  death,  painting  her  precise 
and  grave,  full  of  the  refinement  of  the  dead,  in  sad 
earth-colored  raiment,  set  with  pale  stones. 

Sometimes  this  curiosity  came  in  conflict  with  the  de- 
sire of  beauty;  it  tended  to  make  him  go  too  far  below 
that  outside  of  things  in  which  art  really  begins  and  ends. 
This  struggle  between  the  reason  and  its  ideas,  and  the 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


93 


senses,  the  desire  of  beauty,  is  the  key  to  Leonardo's 
life  at  Milan — his  restlessness,  his  endless  re-touchings, 
his  odd  experiments  with  color.  How  much  must  he  leave 
unfinished,  how  much  recommence!  His  problem  was 
the  transmutation  of  ideas  into  images.  What  he  had 
attained  so  far  had  been  the  mastery  of  that  earlier 
Florentine  style,  with  its  naive  and  limited  sensuousness. 
Now  he  was  to  entertain  in  this  narrow  medium  those 
divinations  of  a  humanity  too  wide  for  it,  that  larger 
vision  of  the  opening  world,  which  is  only  not  too  much 
for  the  great,  irregular  art  of  Shakespeare;  and  every- 
where the  effort  is  visible  in  the  work  of  his  hands. 
This  agitation,  this  perpetual  delay,  give  him  an  air  of 
weariness  and  ennui.  To  others  he  seems  to  be  aiming 
at  an  impossible  effect,  to  do  something  that  art,  thai 
painting,  can  never  do.  Often  the  expression  of  physi- 
cal beauty  at  this  or  that  point  seems  strained  and 
marred  in  the  effort,  as  in  those  heavy  German  fore- 
heads— too  heavy  and  German  for  perfect  beauty. 

For  there  was  a  touch  of  Germany  in  that  genius 
which,  as  Goethe  said,  had  "thought  itself  weary" — 
miide  sich  gedacht.  What  an  anticipation  of  modern 
Germany,  for  instance,  in  that  debate  on  the  question 
whether  sculpture  or  painting  is  the  nobler  art ! 1  But 
there  is  this  difference  between  him  and  the  German, 
that,  with  all  that  curious  science,  the  German  would 
have  thought  nothing  more  was  needed.  The  name  of 
Goethe  himself  reminds  one  how  great  for  the  artist 
may  be  the  danger  of  over-much  science ;  how  Goethe, 

1  How  princely,  how  characteristic  of  Leonardo,  the  answer, 
uanto  piu,  un'  arte  porta  seco  fatica  di  corpo,  tanto  piu  e 
\vile! 


94 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


who,  m  the  Elective  Affinities  and  the  first  part  of  Faust, 
does  transmute  ideas  into  images,  who  wrought  many 
such  transmutations,  did  not  invariably  find  the  spell- 
word,  and  in  the  second  part  of  Faust  presents  us  with 
a  mass  of  science  which  has  almost  no  artistic  character 
at  all.  But  Leonardo  will  never  work  till  the  happy  mo- 
ment comes — that  moment  of  bien-etre,  which  to  imagi- 
native men  is  a  moment  of  invention.  On  this  he  waits 
with  a  perfect  patience ;  other  moments  are  but  a  prep- 
aration, or  after-taste  of  it.  Few  men  distinguish  be- 
tween them  as  jealously  as  he.  Hence  so  many  flaws 
even  in  the  choicest  work.  But  for  Leonardo  the  dis- 
tinction is  absolute,  and,  in  the  moment  of  bien-etre, 
the  alchemy  complete :  the  idea  is  stricken  into  color  and 
imagery:  a  cloudy  mysticism  is  refined  to  a  subdued  and 
graceful  mystery,  and  painting  pleases  the  eye  while  it 
satisfies  the  soul. 

This  curious  beauty  is  seen  above  all  in  his  drawings, 
and  in  these  chiefly  in  the  abstract  grace  of  the  bound- 
ing lines.  Let  us  take  some  of  these  drawings,  and 
pause  over  them  awhile;  and,  first,  one  of  those  at 
Florence — the  heads  of  a  woman  and  a  little  child,  set 
side  by  side,  but  each  in  its  own  separate  frame.  First 
of  all,  there  is  much  pathos  in  the  reappearance,  in  the 
fuller  curves  of  the  face  of  the  child,  of  the  sharper, 
more  chastened  lines  of  the  worn  and  older  face,  which 
leaves  no  doubt  that  the  heads  are  those  of  a  little  child 
and  its  mother.  A  feeling  for  maternity  is  indeed  al- 
ways characteristic  of  Leonardo;  and  this  feeling  is 
further  indicated  here  by  the  half-humorous  pathos  of 
the  diminutive,  rounded  shoulders  of  the  child.  You 
may  note  a  like  pathetic  power  in  drawings  of  a  young 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


9S 


man,  seated  in  a  stooping  posture,  his  face  in  his  hands, 
as  in  sorrow ;  of  a  slave  sitting  in  an  uneasy  inclined 
attitude,  in  some  brief  interval  of  rest;  of  a  small  Ma- 
donna and  Child,  peeping  sideways  in  half-reassured 
terror,  as  a  mighty  griffin  with  batlike  wings,  one  of 
Leonardo's  finest  inventions,  descends  suddenly  from  the 
air  to  snatch  up  a  great  wild  beast  wandering  near  them. 
But  note  in  these,  as  that  which  especially  belongs  to 
art,  the  contour  of  the  young  man's  hair,  the  poise  of 
the  slave's  arm  above  his  head,  and  the  curves  of  the 
head  of  the  child,  following  the  little  skull  within,  thin 
and  fine  as  some  sea-shell  worn  by  the  wind. 

Take  again  another  head,  still  more  full  of  sentiment, 
but  of  a  different  kind,  a  little  drawing  in  red  chalk 
which  every  one  will  remember  who  has  examined  at  all 
carefully  the  drawings  by  old  masters  at  the  Louvre.  It 
is  a  face  of  doubtful  sex,  set  in  the  shadow  of  its  own 
hair,  the  cheek-line  in  high  light  against  it,  with  some- 
thing voluptuous  and  full  in  the  eye-lids  and  the  lips. 
Another  drawing  might  pass  for  the  same  face  in  child- 
hood, with  parched  and  feverish  lips,  but  much  sweetness 
in  the  loose,  short-waisted  childish  dress,  with  necklace 
and  bulla,  and  in  the  daintily  bound  hair.  We  might 
take  the  thread  of  suggestion  which  these  two  drawings 
offer,  when  thus  set  side  by  side,  and,  following  it 
through  the  drawings  at  Florence,  Venice,  and  Milan, 
construct  a  sort  of  series,  illustrating  better  than  any- 
thing else  Leonardo's  type  of  womanly  beauty.  Daugh- 
ters of  Herodias,  with  their  fantastic  head-dresses  knot- 
ted and  folded  so  strangely  to  leave  the  dainty  oval  of 
the  face  disengaged,  they  are  not  of  the  Christian  fam- 
ily, or  of  Raphael's.   They  are  the  clairvoyants,  through 


96 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


whom,  as  through  delicate  instruments,  one  becomes 
aware  of  the  subtler  forces  of  nature,  and  the  modes  of 
their  action,  all  that  is  magnetic  in  it,  all  those  finer  con- 
ditions wherein  material  things  rise  to  that  subtlety  of 
operation  which  constitutes  them  spiritual,  where  only 
the  final  nerve  and  the  keener  touch  can  follow.  It  is 
as  if  in  certain  significant  examples  we  actually  saw 
those  forces  at  their  work  on  human  flesh.  Nervous, 
electric,  faint  always  with  some  inexplicable  faintness, 
these  people  seem  to  be  subject  to  exceptional  condi- 
tions, to  feel  powers  at  work  in  the  common  air  unfelt 
by  others,  to  become,  as  it  were,  the  receptacle  of  them, 
and  pass  them  on  to  us  in  a  chain  of  secret  influences. 

But  among  the  more  youthful  heads  there  is  one  at 
Florence  which  Love  chooses  for  its  own — the  head  of 
a  young  man,  which  may  well  be  the  likeness  of  Andrea 
Salaino,  beloved  of  Leonardo  for  his  curled  and  waving 
hair — belli  capelli  ricci  e  inanellati — and  afterwards  his 
favorite  pupil  and  servant.  Of  all  the  interests  in  living 
men  and  women  which  may  have  filled  his  life  at  Milan, 
this  attachment  alone  is  recorded.  And  in  return  Salaino 
identified  himself  so  entirely  with  Leonardo,  that  the 
picture  of  Saint  Anne,  in  the  Louvre,  has  been  attributed 
to  him.  It  illustrates  Leonardo's  usual  choice  of  pupils, 
men  of  some  natural  charm  of  person  or  intercourse 
like  Salaino,  or  men  of  birth  and  princely  habits  of  life 
like  Francesco  Melzi — men  with  just  enough  genius  to| 
be  capable  of  initiation  into  his  secret,  for  the  sake  of 
which  they  were  ready  to  efface  their  own  individuality. 
Among  them,  retiring  often  to  the  villa  of  the  Melzi  at 
Canonica  al  Vaprio,  he  worked  at  his  fugitive  manu- 
scripts and  sketches,  working  for  the  present  hour,  an(| 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


97 


for  a  few  only,  perhaps  chiefly  for  himself.  Other  ar- 
tists have  been  as  careless  of  present  or  future  applause, 
in  self-forgetfulness,  or  because  they  set  moral  or  po- 
litical ends  above  the  ends  of  art ;  but  in  him  this  solitary 
culture  of  beauty  seems  to  have  hung  upon  a  kind  of 
self-love,  and  a  carelessness  in  the  work  of  art  of  all 
but  art  itself.  Out  of  the  secret  places  of  a  unique  tem- 
perament he  brought  strange  blossoms  and  fruits  hith- 
erto unknown;  and  for  him,  the  novel  impression  con- 
veyed, the  exquisite  effect  woven,  counted  as  an  end  in 
itself — a  perfect  end. 

And  these  pupils  of  his  acquired  his  manner  so  thor- 
oughly, that  though  the  number  of  Leonardo's  authentic 
works  is  very  small  indeed,  there  is  a  multitude  of  other 
men's  pictures  through  which  we  undoubtedly  see  him, 
and  come  very  near  to  his  genius.  Sometimes,  as  in 
the  little  picture  of  the  Madonna  of  the  Balances,  in 
which,  from  the  bosom  of  His  mother,  Christ  weighs 
the  pebbles  of  the  brook  against  the  sins  of  men,  we 
have  a  hand,  rough  enough  by  contrast,  working  upon 
some  fine  hint  or  sketch  of  his.  Sometimes,  as  in  the  sub- 
jects of  the  Daughter  of  Herodias  and  the  Head  of  John 
the  Baptist,  the  lost  originals  have  been  re-echoed  and 
varied  upon  again  and  again  by  Luini  and  others.  At 
other  times  the  original  remains,  but  has  been  a  mere 
theme  or  motive,  a  type  of  which  the  accessories  might 
be  modified  or  changed;  and  these  variations  have  but 
brought  out  the  more  the  purpose,  or  expression  of  the 
original.  It  is  so  with  the  so-called  Saint  John  the  Bap- 
tist of  the  Louvre — one  of  the  few  naked  figures  Leon- 
ardo painted — whose  delicate  brown  flesh  and  woman's 
hair  no  one  would  go  out  into  the  wilderness  to  seek, 


98 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


and  whose  treacherous  smile  would  have  us  understand 
something  far  beyond  the  outward  gesture  or  circum- 
stance. But  the  long,  reedlike  cross  in  the  hand,  which 
suggests  Saint  John  the  Baptist,  becomes  faint  in  a 
copy  at  the  Ambrosian  Library,  and  disappears  altogether 
in  another  version,  in  the  Palazzo  Rosso  at  Genoa.  Re- 
turning from  the  latter  to  the  original,  we  are  no  longer 
surprised  by  Saint  John's  strange  likeness  to  the  Bacchus 
which  hangs  near  it,  and  which  set  Theophile  Gautier 
thinking  of  Heine's  notion  of  decayed  gods,  who,  to 
maintain  themselves,  after  the  fall  of  paganism,  took 
employment  in  the  new  religion.  We  recognise  one  of 
those  symbolical  inventions  in  which  the  ostensible  sub- 
ject is  used,  not  as  matter  for  definite  pictorial  realisa- 
tion, but  as  the  starting-point  of  a  train  of  sentiment, 
subtle  and  vague  as  a  piece  of  music.  No  one  ever  ruled 
over  the  mere  subject  in  hand  more  entirely  than  Leon- 
ardo, or  bent  it  more  dexterously  to  purely  artistic  ends. 
And  so  it  comes  to  pass  that  though  he  handles  sacred 
subjects  continually,  he  is  the  most  profane  of  painters; 
the  given  person  or  subject,  Saint  John  in  the  Desert, 
or  the  Virgin  on  the  knees  of  Saint  Anne,  is  often  merely 
the  pretext  for  a  kind  of  work  which  carries  one  alto- 
gether beyond  the  range  of  its  conventional  associations. 

About  the  Last  Supper,  its  decay  and  restorations, 
a  whole  literature  has  risen  up,  Goethe's  pensive  sketch 
of  its  sad  fortunes  being  perhaps  the  best.  The  death 
in  childbirth  of  the  Duchess  Beatrice  was  followed  in 
Ludovico  by  one  of  those  paroxysms  of  religious  feeling 
which  in  him  were  constitutional.  The  low,  gloomy 
Dominican  church  of  Saint  Mary  of  the  Graces  had  been 
the  favorite  oratory  of  Beatrice.   She  had  spent  her  last 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


99 


days  there,  full  of  sinister  presentiments;  at  last  it  had 
been  almost  necessary  to  remove  her  from  it  by  force; 
and  now  it  was  here  that  mass  was  said  a  hundred  times 
a  day  for  her  repose.  On  the  damp  wall  of  the  refectory, 
oozing  with  mineral  salts,  Leonardo  painted  the  Last 
Supper.  Effective  anecdotes  were  told  about  it,  his 
retouchings  and  delays.  They  show  him  refusing  to 
work  except  at  the  moment  of  invention,  scornful  of  any 
one  who  supposed  that  art  could  be  a  work  of  mere  in- 
dustry and  rule,  often  coming  the  whole  length  of 
Milan  to  give  a  single  touch.  He  painted  it,  not  in 
fresco,  where  all  must  be  impromptu,  but  in  oils,  the  new 
method  which  he  had  been  one  of  the  first  to  welcome, 
because  it  allowed  of  so  many  afterthoughts,  so  refined 
a  working  out  of  perfection.  It  turned  out  that  on  a 
plastered  wall  no  process  could  have  been  less  durable. 
Within  fifty  years  it  had  fallen  into  decay.  And  now 
we  have  to  turn  back  to  Leonardo's  own  studies,  above 
all  to  one  drawing  of  the  central  head  at  the  Br  era, 
which,  in  a  union  of  tenderness  and  severity  in  the  face- 
lines,  reminds  one  of  the  monumental  work  of  Mino 
da  Fiesole,  to  trace  it  as  it  was. 

Here  was  another  effort  to  lift  a  given  subject  out  of 
the  range  of  its  traditional  associations.  Strange,  after 
all  the  mystic  developments  of  the  middle  age,  was  the 
effort  to  see  the  Eucharist,  not  as  the  pale  Host  of  the 
altar,  but  as  one  taking  leave  of  his  friends.  Five  years 
afterwards  the  young  Raphael,  at  Florence,  painted  it 
with  sweet  and  solemn  effect  in  the  refectory  of  Saint 
Onofrio;  but  still  with  all  the  mystical  unreality  of 
the  school  of  Perugino.  Vasari  pretends  that  the  cen- 
tral head  was  never  finished.    But  finished  or  unfinished, 


IOO 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


or  owing  part  of  its  effect  to  a  mellowing  decay,  the 
head  of  Jesus  does  but  consummate  the  sentiment  of 
the  whole  company — ghosts  through  which  you  see  the 
wall,  faint  as  the  shadows  of  the  leaves  upon  the  wall 
on  autumn  afternoons.  This  figure  is  but  the  faintest, 
the  most  spectral  of  them  all. 

The  Last  Supper  was  finished  in  1497;  in  1498  the 
French  entered  Milan,  ^nd  whether  or  not  the  Gascon 
bowmen  used  it  as  a  mark  for  their  arrows,  the  model 
of  Francesco  Sforza  certainly  did  not  survive.  What,  in 
that  age,  such  work  was  capable  of  being — of  what 
nobility,  amid  what  racy  truthfulness  to  fact — we  may 
judge  from  the  bronze  statue  of  Bartolomeo  Colleoni 
on  horseback,  modelled  by  Leonardo's  master,  Ver- 
rocchio  (he  died  of  grief,  it  was  said,  because,  the 
mold  accidentally  failing,  he  was  unable  to  complete 
it),  still  standing  in  the  piazza  of  Saint  John  and  Saint 
Paul  at  Venice.  Some  traces  of  the  thing  may  remain 
in  certain  of  Leonardo's  drawings,  and  perhaps  also,  by 
a  singular  circumstance,  in  a  far-off  town  of  France. 
For  Ludovico  became  a  prisoner,  and  ended  his  days 
at  Loches  in  Touraine.  After  many  years  of  captivity 
in  the  dungeons  below,  where  all  seems  sick  with  barbar- 
ous feudal  memories,  he  was  allowed  at  last,  it  is  said, 
to  breathe  fresher  air  for  awhile  in  one  of  the  rooms 
of  the  great  tower  still  shown,  its  walls  covered  with 
strange  painted  arabesques,  ascribed  by  tradition  to  his 
hand,  amused  a  little,  in  this  way,  through  the  tedious 
years.  In  those  vast  helmets  and  human  faces  and 
pieces  of  armor,  among  which,  in  great  letters,  the  motto 
Infelix  Sum  is  woven  in  and  out,  it  is  perhaps  not 
too  fanciful  to  see  the  fruit  of  a  wistful  after-dreaming 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


IOI 


over  Leonardo's  sundry  experiments  on  the  armed  figure 
of  the  great  duke,  which  had  occupied  the  two  so  much 
during  the  days  of  their  good  fortune  at  Milan. 

The  remaining  years  of  Leonardo's  life  are  more  or 
less  years  of  wandering.  From  his  brilliant  life  at  court 
he  had  saved  nothing,  and  he  returned  to  Florence  a 
poor  man.  Perhaps  necessity  kept  his  spirit  excited : 
the  next  four  years  are  one  prolonged  rapture  of  ecstasy 
of  invention.  He  painted  now  the  pictures  of  the  Louvre* 
his  most  authentic  works,  which  came  there  straight  from 
the  cabinet  of  Francis  the  First,  at  Fontainebleau.  One 
picture  of  his,  the  Saint  Anne — not  the  Saint  Anne  of 
the  Louvre,  but  a  simple  cartoon,  now  in  London — 
revived  for  a  moment  a  sort  of  appreciation  more  com- 
mon in  an  earlier  time,  when  good  pictures  had  still 
seemed  miraculous.  For  two  days  a  crowd  of  people 
of  all  qualities  passed  in  naive  excitement  through  the 
chamber  where  it  hung,  and  gave  Leonardo  a  taste  of  the 
"triumph"  of  Cimabue.  But  his  work  was  less  with  the 
saints  than  with  the  living  women  of  Florence.  For  he 
lived  still  in  the  polished  society  that  he  loved,  and  in 
the  houses  of  Florence,  left  perhaps  a  little  subject  to 
light  thoughts  by  the  death  of  Savonarola — the  latest 
gossip  (1869)  is  of  an  undraped  Monna  Lisa,  found  in 
some  out-of-the-way  corner  of  the  late  Orleans  collec- 
tion— he  saw  Ginevra  di  Benci,  and  Lisa,  the  young  third 
wife  of  Francesco  del  Giocondo.  As  we  have  seen  him 
using  incidents  of  sacred  story,  not  for  their  own  sake, 
nor  as  mere  subjects  for  pictorial  realisation,  but  as 
a  cryptic  language  for  fancies  all  his  own,  so  now  he 
found  a  vent  for  his  thought  in  taking  one  of  these 
languid  women,  and  raising  her,  as  Leda  or  PomonaA 


102 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


as  Modesty  or  Vanity,  to  the  seventh  heaven  of  sym-- 
bolical  expression. 

La  Gioconda  is,  in  the  truest  sense,  Leonardo's  mas- 
terpiece, the  revealing  instance  of  his  mode  of  thought 
and  work.  In  suggestiveness,  only  the  Melancholia  of 
Diirer  is  comparable  to  it;  and  no  crude  symbolism  dis- 
turbs the  effect  of  its  subdued  and  graceful  mystery. 
We  all  know  the  face  and  hands  of  the  figure,  set  in  its 
marble  chair,  in  that  circle  of  fantastic  rocks,  as  in  some 
faint  light  under  sea.  Perhaps  of  all  ancient  pictures 
time  has  chilled  it  least.1  As  often  happens  with  works 
in  which  invention  seems  to  reach  its  limit,  there  is  an 
element  in  it  given  to,  not  invented  by,  the  master.  In 
that  intestimable  folio  of  drawings,  once  in  the  possession 
of  Vasari,  were  certain  designs  by  Verrocchio,  faces  of 
such  impressive  beauty  that  Leonardo  in  his  boyhood 
copied  them  many  times.  It  is  hard  not  to  connect  with 
these  designs  of  the  elder,  by-past  master,  as  with  its 
germinal  principle,  the  unfathomable  smile,  always  with 
a  touch  of  something  sinister  in  it,  which  plays  over  all 
Leonardo's  work.  Besides,  the  picture  is  a  portrait. 
From  childhood  we  see  this  image  defining  itself  on  the 
fabric  of  his  dreams,  and  but  for  express  historical  testi- 
mony, we  might  fancy  that  this  was  but  his  ideal  lady, 
embodied  and  beheld  at  last.  What  was  the  relation- 
ship of  a  living  Florentine  to  this  creature  of  hisj 
thought?  By  what  strange  affinities  had  the  dream  and 
the  person  grown  up  thus  apart,  and  yet  so  closely  to- 
gether? Present  from  the  first  incorporeally  in  Leon- 
ardo's brain,  dimly  traced  in  the  designs  of  Verrocchio, 

1  Yet  for  Vasari  there  was  some  further  magic  of  crimson 
in  the  lips  and  cheeks,  lost  for  us. 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI 


she  is  found  present  at  last  in  //  Giocondo's  house.  That 
there  is  much  of  mere  portraiture  in  the  picture  is  at- 
tested by  the  legend  that  by  artificial  means,  the  presence 
of  mimes  and  flute-players,  that  subtle  expression  was 
protracted  on  the  face.  Again,  was  it  in  four  years  and 
by  renewed  labor  never  really  completed,  or  in  four 
months  and  as  by  stroke  of  magic,  that  the  image  was 
projected? 

The  presence  that  rose  thus  so  strangely  beside  the 
waters,  is  expressive  of  what  in  the  ways  of  a  thousand 
years  men  had  come  to  desire.  Hers  is  the  head  upon 
which  all  "the  ends  of  the  world  are  come,"  and  the 
eyelids  are  a  little  weary.  It  is  a  beauty  wrought  out 
from  within  upon  the  flesh,  the  deposit,  little  cell  by 
cell,  of  strange  thoughts  and  fantastic  reveries  and  ex- 
quisite passions.  Set  it  for  a  moment  beside  one  of 
those  white  Greek  goddesses  or  beautiful  women  of  an- 
tiquity, and  how  would  they  be  troubled  by  this  beauty, 
into  which  the  soul  with  all  its  maladies  has  passed! 
All  the  thoughts  and  experience  of  the  world  have  etched 
and  moulded  there,  in  that  which  they  have  of  power  to 
refine  and  make  expressive  the  outward  form,  the  ani- 
malism of  Greece,  the  lust  of  Rome,  the  mysticism  of 
the  middle  age  with  its  spiritual  ambition  and  imagina- 
tive loves,  the  return  of  the  Pagan  world,  the  sins  of  the 
Borgias.  She  is  older  than  the  rocks  among  which  she 
sits;  like  the  vampire,  she  has  been  dead  many  times, 
and  learned  the  secrets  of  the  grave;  and  has  been  a 
diver  in  deep  seas,  and  keeps  their  fallen  day  about  her ; 
and  trafficked  for  strange  webs  with  Eastern  merchants, 
and,  as  Leda,  was  the  mother  of  Helen  of  Troy,  and, 
as  Saint  Anne,  the  mother  of  Mary;  and  all  this  has 


104 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


been  to  her  but  as  the  sound  of  lyres  and  flutes,  and 
lives  only  in  the  delicacy  with  which  it  has  moulded  thq 
changing  lineaments,  and  tinged  the  eyelids  and  the 
hands.  The  fancy  of  a  perpetual  life,  sweeping  together 
ten  thousand  experiences,  is  an  old  one;  and  modern 
philosophy  has  conceived  the  idea  of  humanity  as 
wrought  upon  by,  and  summing  up  in  itself,  all  modes  of 
thought  and  life.  Certainly  Lady  Lisa  might  stand  as  the 
embodiment  of  the  old  fancy,  the  symbol  of  the  modern 
idea. 

During  these  years  at  Florence  Leonardo's  history  is 
the  history  of  his  art;  for  himself,  he  is  lost  in  the 
bright  cloud  of  it.  The  outward  history  begins  again  in 
1502,  with  a  wild  journey  through  central  Italy,  which 
he  makes  as  the  chief  engineer  of  Caesar  Borgia.  The 
biographer,  putting  together  the  stray  jottings  of  his 
manuscripts,  may  follow  him  through  every  day  of  it, 
up  the  strange  tower  of  Siena,  elastic  like  a  bent  bow, 
down  to  the  seashore  at  Piombino,  each  place  appearing  j 
as  fitfully  as  in  a  fever  dream. 

One  other  great  work  was  left  for  him  to  do,  a  work  j 
all  trace  of  which  soon  vanished,  The  Battle  of  the  \ 
Standard,  in  which  he  had  Michelangelo  for  his  rival. 
The  citizens  of  Florence,  desiring  to  decorate  the  walls 
of  the  great  council-chamber,  had  offered  the  work  for 
competition,  and  any  subject  might  be  chosen  from  the  \ 
Florentine  wars  of  the  fifteenth  century.  Michelangelo 
chose  for  his  cartoon  an  incident  of  the  war  with  Pisa, 
in  which  the  Florentine  soldiers,  bathing  in  the  Arno, 
are  surprised  by  the  sound  of  trumpets,  and  run  to  arms. 
His  design  has  reached  us  only  in  an  old  engraving, 
which  helps  us  less  perhaps  than  our  remembrance  of 


LEONARDO  DA  VINCI  105 


the  background  of  his  Holy  Family  in  the  Ufhzii  to  im- 
agine in  what  superhuman  form,  such  as  might  have 
beguiled  the  heart  of  an  earlier  world,  those  figures  as- 
cended out  of  the  water.  Leonardo  chose  an  incident 
from  the  battle  of  Anghiari,  in  which  two  parties  of 
soldiers  fight  for  a  standard.  Like  Michelangelo's,  his 
cartoon  is  lost,  and  has  come  to  us  only  in  sketches,  and 
in  a  fragment  of  Rubens.  Through  the  accounts  given 
we  may  discern  some  lust  of  terrible  things  in  it,  so  that 
even  the  horses  tore  each  other  with  their  teeth.  And 
yet  one  fragment  of  it,  in  a  drawing  of  his  at  Florence, 
is  far  different — a  waving  field  of  lovely  armour,  the 
chased  edgings  running  like  lines  of  sunlight  from  side 
to  side.  Michelangelo  was  twenty-seven  years  old ;  Leon- 
ardo more  than  fifty;  and  Raphael,  then  nineteen  years 
of  age,  visiting  Florence  for  the  first  time,  came  and 
watched  them  as  they  worked. 

We  catch  a  glimpse  of  Leonardo  again,  at  Rome  in 
15 14,  surrounded  by  his  mirrors  and  vials  and  furnaces, 
making  strange  toys  that  seemed  alive  of  wax  and  quick- 
silver. The  hesitation  which  had  haunted  him  all 
through  life,  and  made  him  like  one  under  a  spell,  was 
upon  him  now  with  double  force.  No  one  had  ever 
carried  political  indifferentism  farther;  it  had  always 
been  his  philosophy  to  "fly  before  the  storm'' ;  he  is  for 
the  Sforzas,  or  against  them,  as  the  tide  of  their  fortune 
turns.  Yet  now,  in  the  political  society  of  Rome,  he 
came  to  be  suspected  of  secret  French  sympathies.  It 
paralysed  him  to  find  himself  among  enemies;  and  he 
turned  wholly  to  France,  which  had  long  courted  him. 

France  was  about  to  become  an  Italy  more  Italian 
than  Italy  itself.    Francis  the  First,  like  Lewis  the 


io6 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


Twelfth  before  him,  was  attracted  by  the  finesse  of 
Leonardo's  work;  La  Gioconda  was  already  in  his  cabi- 
net, and  he  offered  Leonardo  the  little  Chateau  de  Clou, 
with  its  vineyards  and  meadows,  in  the  pleasant  valley 
of  the  Masse,  just  outside  the  walls  of  the  town  of  Am- 
boise,  where,  especially  in  the  hunting  season,  the  court 
then  frequently  resided.  A  Monsieur  Lyonard,  peinteuf 
du  Roy  pour  Amboyse — so  the  letter  of  Francis  the 
First  is  headed.  It  opens  a  prospect,  one  of  the  most 
interesting  in  the  history  of  art,  where,  in  a  peculiarly 
blent  atmosphere,  Italian  art  dies  away  as  a  French 
exotic. 

Two  questions  remain,  after  much  busy  antiquarian- 
ism,  concerning  Leonardo's  death — the  question  of  the 
exact  form  of  his  religion,  and  the  question  whether 
Francis  the  First  was  present  at  the  time.  They  are  of 
about  equally  little  importance  in  the  estimate  of  Leon- 
ardo's genius.  The  directions  in  his  will  concerning  the 
thirty  masses  and  the  great  candles  for  the  church  of 
Saint  Florentin  are  things  of  course,  their  real  purpose 
being  immediate  and  practical;  and  on  no  theory  of  re- 
ligion could  these  hurried  offices  be  of  much  consequence. 
We  forget  them  in  speculating  how  one  who  had  been 
always  so  desirous  of  beauty,  but  desired  it  always  in 
such  precise  and  definite  forms,  as  hands  or  flowers  or 
hair,  looked  forward  now  into  the  vague  land,  and  ex- 
perienced the  last  curiosity. 


1869. 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  GIORGIONE 

It  is  the  mistake  of  much  popular  criticism  to  regard 
poetry,  music,  and  painting — all  the  various  products 
of  art — as  but  translations  into  different  languages  of  one 
and  the  same  fixed  quantity  of  imaginative  thought,  sup- 
plemented by  certain  technical  qualities  of  color,  in  paint- 
ing; of  sound,  in  music;  of  rhythmical  words,  in  poetry". 
In  this  way,  the  sensuous  element  in  art,  and  with  it  al- 
most everything  in  art  that  is  essentially  artistic,  is  made 
a  matter  of  indifference;  and  a  clear  apprehension  of 
the  opposite  principle — that  the  sensuous  material  of 
each  art  brings  with  it  a  special  phase  or  quality  of 
beauty,  untranslatable  into  the  forms  of  any  other,  an 
order  of  impressions  distinct  in  kind — is  the  beginning  of 
all  true  aesthetic  criticism.  For,  as  art  addresses  not 
pure  sense,  still  less  the  pure  intellect,  but  the  "imagi- 
native reason"  through  the  senses,  there  are  differences 
of  kind  in  aesthetic  beauty,  corresponding  to  the  differ- 
ences in  kind  of  the  gifts  of  sense  themselves.  Each 
art,  therefore,  having  its  own  peculiar  and  untranslat- 
able sensuous  charm,  has  its  own  special  mode  of  reach- 
ing the  imagination,  its  own  special  responsibilities  to 
its  material.  One  of  the  functions  of  aesthetic  criticism 
is  to  define  these  limitations ;  to  estimate  the  degree  in 
which  a  given  work  of  art  fulfils  its  responsibilities  to 
its  special  material;  to  note  in  a  picture  that  true  pic- 
torial charm,  which  is  neither  a  mere  poetical  thought  or 

107 


io8 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


sentiment,  on  the  one  hand,  nor  a  mere  result  of  com- 
municable technical  skill  in  color  or  design,  on  the  other  ; 
to  define  in  a  poem  that  true  poetical  quality,  which  is 
neither  descriptive  nor  meditative  merely,  but  comes  of 
an  inventive  handling  of  rhythmical  language,  the  ele- 
ment of  song  in  the  singing;  to  note  in  music  the  musi- 
cal charm,  that  essential  music,  which  presents  no 
words,  no  matter  of  sentiment  or  thought,  separable 
from  the  special  form  in  which  it  is  conveyed  to  us. 

To  such  a  philosophy  of  the  variations  of  the  beau- 
tiful, Lessing's  analysis  of  the  spheres  of  sculpture  and 
poetry,  in  the  Laocoon,  was  an  important  contribution. 
But  a  true  appreciation  of  these  things  is  possible  only 
in  the  light  of  a  whole  system  of  such  art-casuistries. 
Now  painting  is  the  art  in  the  criticism  of  which  this 
truth  most  needs  enforcing,  for  it  is  in  popular  judg- 
ments on  pictures  that  the  false  generalisation  of  all 
art  into  forms  of  poetry  is  most  prevalent.  To  suppose 
that  all  is  mere  technical  acquirement  in  delineation  or 
touch,  working  through  and  addressing  itself  to  the  in- 
telligence, on  the  one  side,  or  a  merely  poetical,  or  what 
may  be  called  literary  interest,  addressed  also  to  the 
pure  intelligence  on  the  other: — this  is  the  way  of  most 
spectators,  and  of  many  critics,  who  have  never  caught 
sight  all  the  time  of  that  true  pictorial  quality  which  lies 
between,  unique  pledge,  as  it  is,  of  the  possession  of 
the  pictorial  gift,  that  inventive  or  creative  handling  of 
pure  line  and  color,  which,  as  almost  always  in  Dutch 
painting,  as  often  also  in  the  works  of  Titian  or  Veron- 
ese, is  quite  independent  of  anything  definitely  poetical 
in  the  subject  it  accompanies.  It  is  the  drazving — the 
design  projected  from  that  peculiar  pictorial  tempera- 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  GIORGIONE  109 

ment  or  constitution,  in  which,  while  it  may  possibly  be 
ignorant  of  true  anatomical  proportions,  all  things  what- 
ever, all  poetry,  all  ideas  however  abstract  or  obscure, 
float  up  as  visible  scene  or  image :  it  is  the  coloring — that 
weaving  of  light,  as  of  just  perceptible  gold  threads, 
through  the  dress,  the  flesh,  the  atmosphere,  in  Titian's 
Lace-girl,  that  staining  of  the  whole  fabric  of  the  thing 
with  a  new,  delightful  physical  quality.  This  drawing, 
then — the  arabesque  traced  in  the  air  by  Tintoret's  flying 
figures,  by  Titian's  forest  branches;  this  coloring — the 
magic  conditions  of  light  and  hue  in  the  atmosphere  of 
Titian's  Lace-girl,  or  Rubens's  Descent  from  the  Cross: 
— these  essential  pictorial  qualities  must  first  of  all  de- 
light the  sense,  delight  it  as  directly  and  sensuously  as 
a  fragment  of  Venetian  glass;  and  through  this  delight 
alone  become  the  vehicle  of  whatever  poetry  or  science 
may  lie  beyond  them  in  the  intention  of  the  composer. 
In  its  primary  aspect,  a  great  picture  has  no  more  definite 
message  for  us  than  an  accidental  play  of  sunlight  and 
shadow  for  a  few  moments  on  the  wall  or  floor :  is  itself, 
in  truth,  a  space  of  such  fallen  light,  caught  as  the  colors 
are  in  an  Eastern  carpet,  but  refined  upon,  and  dealt  with 
more  subtly  and  exquisitely  than  by  nature  itself.  And 
this  primary  and  essential  condition  fulfilled,  we  may 
trace  the  coming  of  poetry  into  painting,  by  fine  grada- 
tions upwards :  from  Japanese  fan-painting,  for  instance, 
where  we  get,  first,  only  abstract  color;  then,  just  a 
little  interfused  sense  of  the  poetry  of  flowers;  then, 
sometimes,  perfect  flower-painting;  and  so,  onwards, 
until  in  Titian  we  have,  as  his  poetry  in  the  Ariadne,  so 
actually  a  touch  of  true  childlike  humor  in  the  diminu- 
tive, quaint  figure  with  its  silk  gown,  which  ascends  the 


no 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


temple  stairs,  in  his  picture  of  the  Presentation  of  the 
Virgin,  at  Venice. 

But  although  each  art  has  thus  its  own  specific  order 
of  impressions,  and  an  untranslatable  charm,  while  a 
just  apprehension  of  the  ultimate  differences  of  the  arts 
is  the  beginning  of  aesthetic  criticism ;  yet  it  is  noticeable 
that,  in  its  special  mode  of  handling  its  given  material, 
each  art  may  be  observed  to  pass  into  the  condition  of 
some  other  art,  by  what  German  critics  term  an  Anders- 
streben — a  partial  alienation  from  its  own  limitations, 
through  which  the  arts  are  able,  not  indeed  to  supply  the 
place  of  each  other,  but  reciprocally  to  lend  each  other 
new  forces. 

Thus  some  of  the  most  delightful  music  seems  to  be 
always  approaching  to  figure,  to  pictorial  definition. 
Architecture,  again,  though  it  has  its  own  laws — laws 
esoteric  enough,  as  the  true  architect  knows  only  too  well 
— yet  sometimes  aims  at  fulfilling  the  conditions  of  a 
picture,  as  in  the  Arena  chapel;  or  of  sculpture,  as  in 
the  flawless  unity  of  Giotto's  tower  at  Florence;  and 
often  finds  a  true  poetry,  as  in  those  strangely  twisted 
staircases  of  the  chateaux  of  the  country  of  the  Loire, 
as  if  it  were  intended  that  among  their  odd  turnings 
the  actors  in  a  theatrical  mode  of  life  might  pass  each 
other  unseen ;  there  being  a  poetry  also  of  memory  and 
of  the  mere  effect  of  time,  by  which  architecture  often 
profits  greatly.  Thus,  again,  sculpture  aspires  out  of 
the  hard  limitation  of  pure  form  towards  color,  or  its 
equivalent;  poetry  also,  in  many  ways,  finding  guidance 
from  the  other  arts,  the  analogy  between  a  Greek  tragedy 
and  a  work  of  Greek  sculpture,  between  a  sonnet  and  a 
relief,  of  French  poetry  generally  with  the  art  of  en- 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  GIORGIONE  in 

graving,  being  more  than  mere  figures  of  speech ;  and  all 
the  arts  in  common  aspiring  towards  the  principle  of 
music;  music  being  the  typical,  or  ideally  consummate 
art,  the  object  of  the  great  Anders-streben  of  all  art,  of 
all  that  is  artistic,  or  partakes  of  artistic  qualities. 

All  art  constantly  aspires  towards  the  condition  of 
music.  For  while  in  all  other  kinds  of  art  it  is  possible 
to  distinguish  the  matter  from  the  form,  and  the  under- 
standing can  always  make  this  distinction,  yet  it  is  the 
constant  effort  of  art  to  obliterate  it.  That  the  mere 
matter  of  a  poem,  for  instance,  its  subject,  namely,  its 
given  incidents  or  situation — that  the  mere  matter  of  a 
picture,  the  actual  circumstances  of  an  event,  the  actual 
topography  of  a  landscape — should  be  nothing  without 
the  form,  the  spirit,  of  the  handling,  that  this  form,  this 
mode  of  handling,  should  become  an  end  in  itself,  should 
penetrate  every  part  of  the  matter:  this  is  what  all  art 
constantly  strives  after,  and  achieves  in  different  de- 
grees. 

This  abstract  language  becomes  clear  enough,  if  we 
think  of  actual  examples.  In  an  actual  landscape  we 
see  a  long,  white  road,  lost  suddenly  on  the  hill-verge. 
That  is  the  matter  of  one  of  the  etchings  of  M.  Alphonse 
Legros:  only,  in  this  etching,  it  is  informed  by  an  in- 
dwelling solemnity  of  expression,  seen  upon  it  or  half- 
seen,  within  the  limits  of  an  exceptional  moment,  or 
caught  from  his  own  mood  perhaps,  but  which  he  main- 
tains as  the  very  essence  of  the  thing,  throughout  his 
work.  Sometimes  a  momentary  tint  of  stormy  light 
may  invest  a  homely  or  too  familiar  scene  with  a  char- 
acter which  might  well  have  been  drawn  from  the  deep 
places  of  the  imagination.    Then  we  might  say  that 


112 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


i 


this  particular  effect  of  light,  this  sudden  inweaving  of 
gold  thread  through  the  texture  of  the  haystack,  and 
the  poplars,  and  the  grass,  gives  the  scene  artistic  quali- 
ties,  that  it  is  like  a  picture.  And  such  tricks  of  circum-  j 
stance  are  commonest  in  landscape  which  has  little  sali- 
ent character  of  its  own ;  because,  in  such  scenery,  all 
the  material  details  are  so  easily  absorbed  by  that  in- 
forming expression  of  passing  light,  and  elevated, 
throughout  their  whole  extent,  to  a  new  and  delightful 
effect  by  it.  And  hence  the  superiority,  for  most  con- 
ditions of  the  picturesque,  of  a  river-side  in  France  to  a 
Swiss  valley,  because,  on  the  French  river-side,  mere 
topography,  the  simple  material,  counts  for  so  little,  and, 
all  being  very  pure,  untouched,  and  tranquil  in  itself,  mere 
light  and  shade  have  such  easy  work  in  modulating  it  to 
one  dominant  tone.  The  Venetian  landscape,  on  the  ii 
other  hand,  has  in  its  material  conditions  much  which  is 
hard,  or  harshly  definite ;  but  the  masters  of  the  Venetian 
school  have  shown  themselves  little  burdened  by  them. 
Of  its  Alpine  background  they  retain  certain  abstracted 
elements  only,  of  cool  color  and  tranquillising  line;  and 
they  use  its  actual  details,  the  brown  windy  turrets,  the 
straw-colored  fields,  the  forest  arabesques,  but  as  the 
notes  of  a  music  which  duly  accompanies  the  presence  of 
their  men  and  women,  presenting  us  with  the  spirit  or 
essence  only  of  a  certain  sort  of  landscape — a  country  of 
the  pure  reason  or  half-imaginative  memory. 

Poetry,  again,  works  with  words  addressed  in  the 
first  instance  to  the  pure  intelligence;  and  it  deals,  most 
often,  with  a  definite  subject  or  situation.  Sometimes  it 
may  find  a  noble  and  quite  legitimate  function  in  the  con- 
veyance of  moral  or  political  aspiration,  as  often  in  the 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  GIORGIONE  113 

poetry  of  Victor  Hugo.  In  such  instances  it  is  easy 
enough  for  the  understanding  to  distinguish  between  the 
matter  and  the  form,  however  much  the  matter,  the 
subject,  the  element  which  is  addressed  to  the  mere  in- 
telligence, has  been  penetrated  by  the  informing,  artistic 
spirit.  But  the  ideal  types  of  poetry  are  those  in  which 
this  distinction  is  reduced  to  its  minimum;  so  that  lyrical 
poetry,  precisely  because  in  it  we  are  least  able  to  detach 
the  matter  from  the  form,  without  a  deduction  of  some- 
thing from  that  matter  itself,  is,  at  least  artistically,  the 
highest  and  most  complete  form  of  poetry.  And  the  very 
perfection  of  such  poetry  often  appears  to  depend,  in 
part,  on  a  certain  suppression  or  vagueness  of  mere  sub- 
ject, so  that  the  meaning  reaches  us  through  ways  not 
distinctly  traceable  by  the  understanding,  as  in  some 
of  the  most  imaginative  compositions  of  William  Blake, 
and  often  in  Shakespeare's  songs,  as  pre-eminently  in 
that  song  of  Mariana's  page  in  Measure  for  Measure, 
in  which  the  kindling  force  and  poetry  of  the  whole  play 
seems  to  pass  for  a  moment  into  an  actual  strain  of 
music. 

And  this  principle  holds  good  of  all  things  that  par- 
take in  any  degree  of  artistic  qualities,  of  the  furniture 
of  our  houses,  and  of  dress,  for  instance,  of  life  itself, 
of  gesture  and  speech,  and  the  details  of  daily  inter- 
course; these  also,  for  the  wise,  being  susceptible  of  a 
suavity  and  charm,  caught  from  the  way  in  which  they 
are  done,  which  gives  them  a  worth  in  themselves. 
Herein,  again,  lies  what  is  valuable  and  justly  attractive, 
in  what  is  called  the  fashion  of  a  time,  which  elevates 
the  trivialities  of  speech,  and  manner,  and  dress,  into 


H4  THE  RENAISSANCE 

"ends  in  themselves/'  and  gives  them  a  mysterious  grace 
and  attractiveness  in  the  doing  of  them. 

Art,  then,  is  thus  always  striving  to  be  independent 
of  the  mere  intelligence,  to  become  a  matter  of  pure 
perception,  to  get  rid  of  its  responsibilities  to  its  subject 
or  material;  the  ideal  examples  of  poetry  and  painting 
being  those  in  which  the  constituent  elements  of  the 
composition  are  so  welded  together,  that  the  material  or 
subject  no  longer  strikes  the  intellect  only;  nor  the  form, 
the  eye  or  the  ear  only;  but  form  and  matter,  in  their 
union  or  identity,  present  one  single  effect  to  the  "imagi- 
native reason,"  that  complex  faculty  for  which  every 
thought  and  feeling  is  twin-born  with  its  sensible  ana- 
logue or  symbol. 

It  is  the  art  of  music  which  most  completely  realises 
this  artistic  ideal,  this  perfect  identification  of  matter 
and  form.  In  its  consummate  moments,  the  end  is  not 
distinct  from  the  means,  the  form  from  the  matter,  the 
subject  from  the  expression;  they  inhere  in  and  com- 
pletely saturate  each  other;  and  to  it,  therefore,  to  the 
condition  of  its  perfect  moments,  all  the  arts  may  be 
supposed  constantly  to  tend  and  aspire.  In  music,  then, 
rather  than  in  poetry,  is  to  be  found  the  true  type  or 
measure  of  perfected  art.  Therefore,  although  each  art 
has  its  incommunicable  element,  its  untranslatable  order 
of  impressions,  its  unique  mode  of  reaching  the  "imagi- 
native reason,"  yet  the  arts  may  be  represented  as  con- 
tinually struggling  after  the  law  or  principle  of  music, 
to  a  condition  which  music  alone  completely  realises ;  and 
one  of  the  chief  functions  of  aesthetic  criticism,  dealing 
with  the  products  of  art,  new  or  old,  is  to  estimate  the 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  GIORGIONE  115 

degree  in  which  each  of  those  products  approaches,  in 
this  sense,  to  musical  law. 

By  no  school  of  painters  have  the  necessary  limita- 
tions of  the  art  of  painting  been  so  unerringly  though 
instinctively  apprehended,  and  the  essence  of  what  is 
pictorial  in  a  picture  so  justly  conceived,  as  by  the  school 
of  Venice ;  and  the  train  of  thought  suggested  in  what 
has  been  now  said  is,  perhaps,  a  not  unfitting  introduc- 
tion to  a  few  pages  about  Giorgione,  who,  though  much 
has  been  taken  by  recent  criticism  from  what  was  reputed 
to  be  his  work,  yet,  more  entirely  than  any  other  painter, 
sums  up,  in  what  we  know  of  himself  and  his  art,  the 
spirit  of  the  Venetian  school. 

The  beginnings  of  Venetian  painting  link  themselves  to 
the  last,  stiff,  half-barbaric  splendors  of  Byzantine  dec- 
oration, and  are  but  the  introduction  into  the  crust  of 
marble  and  gold  on  the  walls  of  the  Duomo  of  Murano, 
or  of  Saint  Mark's,  of  a  little  more  of  human  expression. 
And  throughout  the  course  of  its  later  development,  al- 
ways subordinate  to  architectural  effect,  the  work  of  the 
Venetian  school  never  escaped  from  the  influence  of  its 
beginnings.  Unassisted,  and  therefore  unperplexed,  by 
naturalism,  religious  mysticism,  philosophical  theories,  it 
had  no  Giotto,  no  Angelico,  no  Botticelli.  Exempt  from 
the  stress  of  thought  and  sentiment,  which  taxed  so 
severely  the  resources  of  the  generations  of  Florentine 
artists,  those  earlier  Venetian  painters,  down  to  Carpaccio 
and  the  Bellini,  seem  never  for  a  moment  to  have  been 
so  much  as  tempted  to  lose  sight  of  the  scope  of  their 
art  in  its  strictness,  or  to  forget  that  painting  must  be 
before  all  things  decorative,  a  thing  for  the  eye,  a  space 


Ii6  THE  RENAISSANCE 

of  color  on  the  wall,  only  more  dexterously  blent  than 
the  marking  of  its  precious  stone  or  the  chance  inter- 
change of  sun  and  shade  upon  it : — this,  to  begin  and  end 
with ;  whatever  higher  matter  of  thought,  or  poetry,  or 
religious  reverie  might  play  its  part  therein,  between.  At 
last,  with  final  mastery  of  all  the  technical  secrets  of  his 
art,  and  with  somewhat  more  than  "a  spark  of  the  di- 
vine fire"  to  his  share,  comes  Giorgione.  He  is  the  in- 
ventor of  genre,  of  those  easily  movable  pictures  which 
serve  neither  for  uses  of  devotion,  nor  of  allegorical  or 
historic  teaching — little  groups  of  real  men  and  women, 
amid  congruous  furniture  or  landscape — morsels  of  ac- 
tual life,  conversation  or  music  or  play,  but  refined  upon 
or  idealised,  till  they  come  to  seem  like  glimpses  of  life 
from  afar.  Those  spaces  of  more  cunningly  blent  color, 
obediently  filling  their  places,  hitherto,  in  a  mere  archi- 
tectural scheme,  Giorgione  detaches  from  the  wall.  He 
frames  them  by  the  hands  of  some  skilful  carver,  so  that 
people  may  move  them  readily  and  take  with  them  where 
they  go,  as  one  might  a  poem  in  manuscript,  or  a  musical 
instrument,  to  be  used,  at  will,  as  a  means  of  self-educa- 
tion, stimulus  or  solace,  coming  like  an  animated  pres- 
ence, into  one's  cabinet,  to  enrich  the  air  as  with  some 
choice  aroma,  and,  like  persons,  live  with  us,  for  a  day  or 
a  lifetime.  Of  all  art  such  as  this,  art  which  has  played 
so  large  a  part  in  men's  culture  since  that  time,  Giorgione, 
is  the  initiator.  Yet  in  him  too  that  old  Venetian  clear- 
ness or  justice,  in  the  apprehension  of  the  essential  limi- 
tations of  the  pictorial  art,  is  still  undisturbed.  While 
he  interfuses  his  painted  work  with  a  high-strung  sort 
of  poetry,  caught  directly  from  a  singularly  rich  and 
high-strung  sort  of  life,  yet  in  his  selection  of  subject, 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  GIORGIONE  uy 


or  phase  of  subject,  in  the  subordination  of  mere  subject 
to  pictorial  design,  to  the  main  purpose  of  a  picture,  he 
is  typical  of  that  aspiration  of  all  the  arts  towards  music, 
which  I  have  endeavored  to  explain, — towards  the  per- 
fect identification  of  matter  and  form. 

Born  so  near  to  Titian,  though  a  little  before  him, 
that  these  two  companion  pupils  of  the  aged  Giovanni 
Bellini  may  almost  be  called  contemporaries,  Giorgione 
stands  to  Titian  in  something  like  the  relationship  of 
Sordello  to  Dante,  in  Browning's  poem.  Titian,  when 
he  leaves  Bellini,  becomes,  in  turn,  the  pupil  of  Giorgione. 
He  lives  in  constant  labor  more  than  sixty  years  after 
Giorgione  is  in  his  grave;  and  with  such  fruit,  that 
hardly  one  of  the  greater  towns  of  Europe  is  without 
some  fragment  of  his  work.  But  the  slightly  older  man, 
with  his  so  limited  actual  product  (what  remains  to  us 
of  it  seeming,  when  narrowly  explained,  to  reduce  itself 
to  almost  one  picture,  like  Sordello's  one  fragment  of 
lovely  verse),  yet  expresses,  in  elementary  motive  and 
principle,  that  spirit — itself  the  final  acquisition  of  all 
the  long  endeavors  of  Venetian  art — which  Titian 
spreads  over  his  whole  life's  activity. 

And,  as  we  might  expect,  something  fabulous  and  il-  ' 
lusive  has  always  mingled  itself  in  the  brilliancy  of 
Giorgione's  fame.  The  exact  relationship  to  him  of 
many  works — drawings,  portraits,  painted  idylls — often 
fascinating  enough,  which  in  various  collections  went  by 
his  name,  was  from  the  first  uncertain.  Still,  six  or 
eight  famous  pictures  at  Dresden,  Florence  and  the 
Louvre,  were  with  no  doubt  attributed  to  him,  and  in 
these,  if  anywhere,  something  of  the  splendor  of  the 
old  Venetian  humanity  seemed  to  have  been  preserved. 


n8 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


But  of  those  six  or  eight  famous  pictures  it  is  now  known 
that  only  one  is  certainly  from  Giorgione's  hand.  The  ac- 
complished science  of  the  subject  has  come  at  last,  and, 
as  in  other  instances,  has  not  made  the  past  more  real  for 
us,  but  assured  us  only  that  we  possess  less  of  it  than  we 
seemed  to  possess.  Much  of  the  work  on  which  Giorgi- 
one's immediate  fame  depended,  work  done  for  instan- 
taneous effect,  in  all  probability  passed  away  almost  with- 
in his  own  age,  like  the  frescoes  on  the  fagade  of  the 
fondaco  dei  Tedeschi  at  Venice,  some  crimson  traces  of 
which,  however,  still  give  a  strange  additional  touch  of 
splendor  to  the  scene  of  the  Rialto.  And  then  there  is  a 
barrier  or  borderland,  a  period  about  the  middle  of  the 
sixteenth  century,  in  passing  through  which  the  tradition 
miscarries,  and  the  true  outlines  of  Giorgione's  work  and 
person  are  obscured.  It  became  fashionable  for  wealthy 
lovers  of  art,  with  no  critical  standard  of  authenticity, 
to  collect  so-called  works  of  Giorgione,  and  a  multitude 
of  imitations  came  into  circulation.  And  now,  in  the 
"new  Vasari,"  1  the  great  traditional  reputation,  woven 
with  so  profuse  demand  on  men's  admiration,  has  been 
scrutinized  thread  by  thread ;  and  what  remains  of  the 
most  vivid  and  stimulating  of  Venetian  masters,  a  live 
flame,  as  it  seemed,  in  those  old  shadowy  times,  has  been 
reduced  almost  to  a  name  by  his  most  recent  critics. 

Yet  enough  remains  to  explain  why  the  legend  grew 
up  above  the  name,  why  the  name  attached  itself,  in 
many  instances,  to  the  bravest  work  of  other  men.  The 
Concert  in  the  Pitti  Palace,  in  which  a  monk,  with  cowl 
and  tonsure,  touches  the  keys  of  a  harpsichord,  while  a 

1  Crowe  and  Cavalcaselle :  History  of  Painting  in  North 
Italy. 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  GIORGIONE  119 

clerk,  placed  behind  him,  grasps  the  handle  of  the  viol, 
and  a  third,  with  cap  and  plume,  seems  to  wait  upon  the 
true  interval  for  beginning  to  sing,  is  undoubtedly 
Giorgione's.  The  outline  of  the  lifted  finger,  the  trace 
of  the  plume,  the  very  threads  of  the  fine  linen,  which 
fasten  themselves  on  the  memory,  in  the  moment  before 
they  are  lost  altogether  in  that  calm  unearthly  glow,  the 
skill  which  has  caught  the  waves  of  wandering  sound, 
and  fixed  them  for  ever  on  the  lips  and  hands — these  are 
indeed  the  master's  own;  and  the  criticism  which,  while 
dismissing  so  much  hitherto  believed  to  be  Giorgione's, 
has  established  the  claims  of  this  one  picture,  has  left  it 
among  the  most  precious  things  in  the  world  of  art. 

It  is  noticeable  that  the  "distinction"  of  this  Concert, 
its  sustained  evenness  of  perfection,  alike  in  design,  in 
execution,  and  in  choice  of  personal  type,  becomes  for 
the  "new  Vasari"  the  standard  of  Giorgione's  genuine 
work.  Finding  here  sufficient  to  explain  his  influence, 
and  the  true  seal  of  mastery,  its  authors  assign  to  Pelle- 
grino  da  San  Daniele  the  Holy  Family  in  the  Louvre,  in 
consideration  of  certain  points  where  it  comes  short  of 
this  standard.  Such  shortcoming,  however,  will  hardly 
diminish  the  spectator's  enjoyment  of  a  singular  charm 
of  liquid  air,  with  which  the  whole  picture  seems  in- 
stinct, filling  the  eyes  and  lips,  the  very  garments,  of  its 
sacred  personages,  with  some  wind-searched  brightness 
and  energy;  of  which  fine  air  the  blue  peak,  clearly  de- 
fined in  the  distance,  is,  as  it  were,  the  visible  pledge. 
Similarly,  another  favorite  picture  in  the  Louvre,  the  sub- 
ject of  a  delightful  sonnet  by  a  poet 1  whose  own  painted 
work  often  comes  to  mind  as  one  ponders  over  these 
1  Dante  Gabriel  Rossetti. 


120 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


precious  things — the  Fete  Champetre,  is  assigned  to  an 
imitator  of  Sebastian  del  Piombo ;  and  the  Tempest,  in 
the  Academy  at  Venice,  to  Paris  Bordone,  or  perhaps 
to  "some  advanced  craftsman  of  the  sixteenth  century/1 
From  the  gallery  at  Dresden,  the  Knight  embracing  a 
Lady,  where  the  knight's  broken  gauntlets  seem  to  mark 
some  well-known  pause  in  a  story  we  would  willingly 
hear  the  rest  of,  is  conceded  to  "a  Brescian  hand,"  and 
Jacob  meeting  Rachel  to  a  pupil  of  Palma.  And  then, 
whatever  their  charm,  we  are  called  on  to  give  up  the 
Ordeal,  and  the  Finding  of  Moses  with  its  jewel-like 
pools  of  water,  perhaps  to  Bellini. 

Nor  has  the  criticism,  which  thus  so  freely  diminishes 
the  number  of  his  authentic  works,  added  anything  im- 
portant to  the  well-known  outline  of  the  life  and  per- 
sonality of  the  man :  only,  it  has  fixed  one  or  two  dates, 
one  or  two  circumstances,  a  little  more  exactly.  Giorgi- 
one  was  born  before  the  year  1477,  an<^  spent  his  child- 
hood at  Castelfranco,  where  the  last  crags  of  the  Vene- 
tian Alps  break  down  romantically,  with  something  of 
parklike  grace,  to  the  plain.  A  natural  child  of  the 
family  of  the  Barbarelli  by  a  peasant-girl  of  Vedelago, 
he  finds  his  way  early  into  the  circle  of  notable  persons — 
people  of  courtesy.  He  is  initiated  into  those  differences 
of  personal  type,  manner,  and  even  of  dress,  which  are 
best  understood  there — that  "distinction"  of  the  Concert 
of  the  Pitti  Palace.  Not  far  from  his  home  lives  Cather- 
ine of  Cornara,  formerly  Queen  of  Cyprus;  and,  up  in 
the  towers  which  still  remain,  Tuzio  Costanzo,  the  fa- 
mous condottiere — a  picturesque  remnant  of  medieval 
manners,  amid  a  civilisation  rapidly  changing.  Giorgi- 
ane  paints  their  portraits ;  and  when  Tuzio's  son,  Matteo, 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  GIORGIONE  121 

dies  in  early  youth,  adorns  in  his  memory  a  chapel  in 
the  church  of  Castelfranco,  painting  on  this  occasion, 
perhaps,  the  altar-piece,  foremost  among  his  authentic 
works,  still  to  be  seen  there,  with  the  figure  of  the  war- 
rior-saint, Liberale,  of  which  the  original  little  study 
in  oil,  with  the  delicately  gleaming,  silver-grey  armour, 
is  one  of  the  greater  treasures  of  the  National  Gallery. 
In  that  figure,  as  in  some  other  knightly  personages  at- 
tributed to  him,  people  have  supposed  the  likeness  of 
the  painter's  own  presumably  gracious  presence.  Thith- 
er, at  last,  he  is  himself  brought  home  from  Venice,  early 
dead,  but  celebrated.  It  happened,  about  his  thirty- 
fourth  year,  that  in  one  of  those  parties  at  which  he 
entertained  his  friends  with  music,  he  met  a  certain  lady 
of  whom  he  became  greatly  enamoured,  and  "they  re- 
joiced greatly,"  says  Vasari,  "the  one  and  the  other,  in 
their  loves. "  And  two  quite  different  legends  concern- 
ing it  agree  in  this,  that  it  was  through  this  lady  he  came 
by  his  death;  Ridolfi  relating  that,  being  robbed  of 
her  by  one  of  his  pupils,  he  died  of  grief  at  the  double 
treason;  Vasari,  that  she  being  secretly  stricken  of  the 
plague,  and  he  making  his  visits  to  her  as  usual,  Giorgi- 
one  took  the  sickness  from  her  mortally,  along  with  her 
kisses,  and  so  briefly  departed. 

But,  although  the  number  of  Giorgione's  extant  works 
has  been  thus  limited  by  recent  criticism,  all  is  not  done 
when  the  real  and  the  traditional  elements  in  what  con- 
cerns him  have  been  discriminated;  for,  in  what  is  con- 
nected with  a  great  name,  much  that  is  not  real  is  often 
very  stimulating.  For  the  aesthetic  philosopher,  there- 
fore, over  and  above  the  real  Giorgione  and  his  authentic 
extant  works,  there  remains  the  Giorgionesque  also — an 


122 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


influence,  a  spirit  or  type  in  art,  active  in  men  so  differ- 
ent as  those  to  whom  many  of  his  supposed  works  are 
really  assignable.  A  veritable  school,  in  fact,  grew  to- 
gether out  of  all  those  fascinating  works  rightly  or 
wrongly  attributed  to  him;  out  of  many  copies  from,  or 
variations  on  him,  by  unknown  or  uncertain  workmen, 
whose  drawings  and  designs  were,  for  various  reasons, 
prized  as  his ;  out  of  the  immediate  impression  he  made 
upon  his  contemporaries,  and  with  which  he  continued 
in  men's  minds;  out  of  many  traditions  of  subject  and 
treatment,  which  really  descend  from  him  to  our  own 
time,  and  by  retracing  which  we  fill  out  the  original 
image.  Giorgione  thus  becomes  a  sort  of  impersona- 
tion of  Venice  itself,  its  projected  reflex  or  ideal,  all 
that  was  intense  or  desirable  in  it  crystallising  about  the 
memory  of  this  wonderful  young  man. 

And  now,  finally,  let  me  illustrate  some  of  the  char- 
acteristics of  this  School  of  Giorgione,  as  we  may  call 
it,  which,  for  most  of  us,  notwithstanding  all  that  nega- 
tive criticism  of  the  "new  Vasari,"  will  still  identify 
itself  with  those  famous  pictures  at  Florence,  at  Dres- 
den and  Paris.  A  certain  artistic  ideal  is  there  defined 
for  us — the  conception  of  a  peculiar  aim  and  procedure 
in  art,  which  we  may  understand  as  the  Giorgionesque, 
wherever  we  find  it,  whether  in  Venetian  work  generally, 
or  in  work  of  our  own  time.  Of  this  the  Concert,  that 
undoubted  work  of  Giorgione  in  the  Pitti  Palace,  is  the 
typical  instance,  and  a  pledge  authenticating  the  connex- 
ion of  the  school,  and  the  spirit  of  the  school,  with  the 
master. 

I  have  spoken  of  a  certain  interpenetration  of  the 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  GIORGIONE  123 


matter  or  subject  of  a  work  of  art  with  the  form  of  it, 
a  condition  realised  absolutely  only  in  music,  as  the  con- 
dition to  which  every  form  of  art  is  perpetually  aspir- 
ing. In  the  art  of  painting,  the  attainment  of  this  ideal 
condition,  this  perfect  interpenetration  of  the  subject 
with  the  elements  of  colour  and  design,  depends,  of 
course,  in  great  measure,  on  dexterous  choice  of  that 
subject,  or  phase  of  subject;  and  such  choice  is  one  of 
the  secrets  of  Giorgione's  school.  It  is  the  school  of 
genre,  and  employs  itself  mainly  with  "painted  idylls/' 
but,  in  the  production  of  this  pictorial  poetry,  exercises 
a  wonderful  tact  in  the  selecting  of  such  matter  as  lends 
itself  most  readily  and  entirely  to  pictorial  form,  to  com- 
plete expression  by  drawing  and  colour.  For  although  its 
productions  are  painted  poems,  they  belong  to  a  sort  of 
poetry  which  tells  itself  without  an  articulated  story. 
The  master  is  pre-eminent  for  the  resolution,  the  case 
and  quickness,  with  which  he  reproduces  instantaneous 
motion — the  lacing-cn  of  armour,  with  the  head  bent  back 
so  stately — the  fainting  lady — the  embrace,  rapid  as  the 
kiss,  caught  with  death  itself  from  dying  lips — some  mo- 
mentary conjunction  of  mirrors  and  polished  armour  and 
still  water,  by  which  all  the  sides  of  a  solid  image  are 
exhibited  at  once,  solving  that  casuistical  question 
whether  painting  can  present  an  object  as  completely  as 
sculpture.  The  sudden  act,  the  rapid  transition  of 
thought,  the  passing  expression — this  he  arrests  with  that 
vivacity  which  Vasari  has  attributed  to  him,  il  fuoco 
Giorgionesco,  as  he  terms  it.  Now  it  is  part  of  the 
ideality  of  the  highest  sort  of  dramatic  poetry,  that  it 
presents  us  with  a  kind  of  profoundly  significant  and 
animated  instants,  a  mere  gesture,  a  look,  a  smile,  per- 


124 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


haps — some  brief  and  wholly  concrete  moment — into 
which,  however,  all  the  motives,  all  the  interests  and 
effects  of  a  long  history,  have  condensed  themselves,  and 
which  seem  to  absorb  past  and  future  in  an  intense  con- 
sciousness of  the  present.  Such  ideal  instants  the  school 
of  Giorgione  selects,  with  its  admirable  tact,  from  that 
feverish,  tumultuously  coloured  world  of  the  old  citizens 
of  Venice — exquisite  pauses  in  time,  in  which,  arrested 
thus,  we  seem  to  be  spectators  of  all  the  fulness  of  ex- 
istence, and  which  are  like  some  consummate  extract  or 
quintessence  of  life. 

It  is  to  the  law  or  condition  of  music,  as  I  said,  that 
all  art  like  this  is  really  aspiring;  and,  in  the  school  of 
Giorgione,  the  perfect  moments  of  music  itself,  the  mak- 
ing or  hearing  of  music,  song  or  its  accompaniment,  are 
themselves  prominent  as  subjects.  On  that  back-ground 
of  the  silence  of  Venice,  so  impressive  to  the  modern 
visitor  the  world  of  Italian  music  was  then  forming.  In 
choice  of  subject,  as  in  all  besides,  the  Concert  of  the 
Pitti  Palace  is  typical  of  everything  that  Giorgione,  him- 
self an  admirable  musician,  touched  with  his  influence. 
In  sketch  or  finished  picture,  in  various  collections,  we 
may  follow  it  through  many  intricate  variations — men 
fainting  at  music;  music  at  the  pool-side  while  people 
fish,  or  mingled  with  the  sound  of  the  pitcher  in  the 
well,  or  heard  across  running  water,  or  among  the  flocks ; 
the  tuning  of  instruments ;  people  with  intent  faces,  as  if 
listening,  like  those  described  by  Plato  in  an  ingenious 
passage  of  the  Republic,  to  detect  the  smallest  interval 
of  musical  sound,  the  smallest  undulation  in  the  air,  or 
feeling  for  music  in  thought  on  a  stringless  instrument, 
ear  and  finger  refining  themselves  infinitely,  in  the  ap^ 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  GIORGIONE  125 

petite  for  sweet  sound;  a  momentary  touch  of  an  in- 
strument in  the  twilight,  as  one  passes  through  some 
unfamiliar  room,  in  a  chance  company. 

In  these  then,  the  favourite  incidents  of  Giorgione's 
school,  music  or  the  musical  intervals  in  our  existence, 
life  itself  is  conceived  as  a  sort  of  listening — listening 
to  music,  to  the  reading  of  Bandello's  novels,  to  the 
sound  of  water,  to  time  as  it  flies.  Often  such  moments 
are  really  our  moments  of  play,  and  we  are  surprised  at 
the  unexpected  blessedness  of  what  may  seem  our  least 
important  part  of  time;  not  merely  because  play  is  in 
many  instances  that  to  which  people  really  apply  their 
own  best  powers,  but  also  because  at  such  times,  the 
stress  of  our  servile,  everyday  attentiveness  being  re- 
laxed, the  happier  powers  in  things  without  are  per- 
mitted free  passage,  and  have  their  way  with  us.  And 
so,  from  music,  the  school  of  Giorgione  passes  often  to 
the  play  which  is  like  music;  to  those  masques  in  which 
men  avowedly  do  but  play  at  real  life,  like  children 
"dressing  up,"  disguised  in  the  strange  old  Italian 
dresses,  particoloured,  or  fantastic  with  embroidery  and 
furs,  of  which  the  master  was  so  curious  a  designer,  and 
which,  above  all  the  spotless  white  linen  at  wrist  and 
throat,  he  painted  so  dexterously. 

But  when  people  are  happy  in  this  thirsty  land  water 
will  not  be  far  off ;  and  in  the  school  of  Giorgione,  the 
presence  of  water — the  well,  or  marble-rimmed  pool, 
the  drawing  or  pouring  of  water,  as  the  woman  pours 
it  from  a  pitcher  with  her  jewelled  hand  in  the  Fete 
Champetre,  listening,  perhaps,  to  the  cool  sound  as  it 
falls,  blent  with  the  music  of  the  pipes — is  as  charac- 
teristic, and  almost  as  suggestive,  as  that  of  music  itself. 


126 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


And  the  landscape  feels  and  is  glad  of  it  also — a  land- 
scape full  of  clearness,  of  the  effects  of  water,  of  fresh 
rain  newly  passed  through  the  air,  and  collected  into  the 
grassy  channels.  The  air,  moreover,  in  the  school  of 
Giorgione,  seems  as  vivid  as  the  people  who  breathe 
it,  and  literally  empyrean,  all  impurities  being  burnt  out 
of  it,  and  no  taint,  no  floating  particle  of  anything  but 
its  own  proper  elements  allowed  to  subsist  within  it. 

Its  scenery  is  such  as  in  England  we  call  "park  scen- 
ery," with  some  elusive  refinement  felt  about  the  rustic 
buildings,  the  choice  grass,  the  grouped  trees,  the  undula- 
tions deftly  economised  for  graceful  effect.  Only,  in 
Italy  all  natural  things  are  as  it  were  woven  through  and 
through  the  gold  thread,  even  the  cypress  revealing  it 
among  the  folds  of  its  blackness.  And  it  is  with  gold 
dust,  or  gold  thread,  that  these  Venetian  painters  seem 
to  work,  spinning  its  fine  filaments,  through  the  solemn 
human  flesh,  away  into  the  white  plastered  walls  of  the 
thatched  huts.  The  harsher  details  of  the  mountains  re- 
cede to  a  harmonious  distance,  the  one  peak  of  rich  blue 
above  the  horizon  remaining  but  as  the  sensible  war- 
rant of  that  due  coolness  which  is  all  we  need  ask  here 
of  the  Alps,  with  their  dark  rains  and  streams.  Yet  what 
real,  airy  space,  as  the  eye  passes  from  level  to  level, 
through  the  loog-drawn  valley  in  which  Jacob  embraces 
Rachel  among  the  flocks!  Nowhere  is  there  a  truer 
instance  of  that  balance,  that  modulated  unison  of  land- 
scape and  persons — of  the  human  image  and  its  acces- 
sories— already  noticed  as  characteristic  of  the  Vene- 
tian school,  so  that,  in  it,  neither  personage  nor  scenery 
is  ever  a  mere  pretext  for  the  other. 

Something  like  this  seems  to  me  to  be  the  vraie  verite 


THE  SCHOOL  OF  GIORGIONE  127 


about  Giorgione,  if  I  may  adopt  a  serviceable  expres- 
sion, by  which  the  French  recognise  those  more  liberal 
and  durable  impressions  which,  in  respect  of  any  really 
considerable  person  or  subject,  anything  that  has  at 
all  intricately  occupied  men's  attention,  lie  beyond,  and 
must  supplement,  the  narrower  range  of  the  strictly 
ascertained  facts  about  it.  In  this,  Giorgione  is  but  an 
illustration  of  a  valuable  general  caution  we  may  abide 
by  in  all  criticism.  As  regards  Giorgione  himself,  we 
have  indeed  to  take  note  of  all  those  negotiations  and 
exceptions,  by  which,  at  first  sight,  a  "'new  Vasari" 
seems  merely  to  have  confused  our  apprehension  of 
a  delightful  object,  to  have  explained  away  in  our 
inheritance  from  past  time  what  seemed  of  high  value 
there.  Yet  it  is  not  with  a  full  understanding  even  of 
those  exceptions  that  one  can  leave  off  just  at  this  point. 
Properly  qualified,  such  exceptions  are  but  a  salt  of 
genuineness  in  our  knowledge;  and  beyond  all  those 
strictly  ascertained  facts,  we  must  take  note  of  that 
indirect  influence  by  which  one  like  Giorgione,  for 
instance,  enlarges  his  permanent  efficacy  and  really  makes 
himself  felt  in  our  culture.  In  a  just  impression  of 
that,  is  the  essential  truth,  the  vraie  verite,  concerning 
him. 


1877. 


JOACHIM  DU  BELLAY 

In  the  middle  of  the  sixteenth  century,  when  the 
spirit  of  the  Renaissance  was  everywhere,  and  people 
had  begun  to  look  back  with  distaste  on  the  works  of 
the  middle  age,  the  old  Gothic  manner  had  still  one 
chance  more,  in  borrowing  something  from  the  rival 
which  was  about  to  supplant  it.  In  this  way  there  was 
produced,  chiefly  in  France,  a  new  and  peculiar  phase 
of  taste  with  qualities  and  a  charm  of  its  own,  blending 
the  somewhat  attenuated  grace  of  Italian  ornament  with 
the  general  outlines  of  Northern  design.  It  created  the 
Chateau  de  Gaillon,  as  you  may  still  see  it  in  the  delicate 
engravings  of  Israel  Silvestre — a  Gothic  donjon  veiled 
faintly  by  a  surface  of  dainty  Italian  traceries — Chenon- 
ceaux,  Blois,  Chambord,  and  the  church  of  Brou.  In 
painting,  there  came  from  Italy  workmen  like  Maitre 
Roux  and  the  masters  of  the  school  of  Fontainebleau, 
to  have  their  later  Italian  voluptuousness  attempered  by 
the  naive  and  silvery  qualities  of  the  native  style;  and 
it  was  characteristic  of  these  painters  that  they  were 
most  successful  in  painting  on  glass,  an  art  so  essentially 
medieval.  Taking  it  up  where  the  middle  age  had  left 
it,  they  found  their  whole  work  among  the  last  subtleties 
of  colour  and  line;  and  keeping  within  the  true  limits 
of  their  material,  they  got  quite  a  new  order  of  effects 
from  it,  and  felt  their  way  to  refinements  on  colour  never 
dreamed  of  by  those  older  workmen,  the  glass-painters 

128 


JOACHIM  DU  BELLAY 


of  Chartres  or  le  Mans.  What  is  called  the  Renais- 
sance in  France  is  thus  not  so  much  the  introduction 
of  a  wholly  new  taste  ready-made'  from  Italy,  but 
rather  the  finest  and  subtlest  phase  of  the  middle  age 
itself,  its  last  fleeting  splendour  and  temperate  Saint 
Martin's  summer.  In  poetry,  the  Gothic  spirit  in  France 
had  produced  a  thousand  songs ;  so  in  the  Renaissance, 
French  poetry,  too,  did  but  borrow  something  to  blend 
with  a  native  growth,  and  the  poems  of  Ronsard,  with 
their  ingenuity,  their  delicately  figured  surfaces,  their 
slightness,  their  fanciful  combinations  of  rhyme,  are  the 
correlative  of  the  traceries  of  the  house  of  Jacques  Coeur 
at  Bourges,  or  the  Maison  de  Justice  at  Rouen. 

There  was  indeed  something  in  the  native  French  taste 
naturally  akin  to  that  Italian  finesse.  The  characteristic 
of  -French  work  had  always  been  a  certain  nicety,  a 
remarkable  daintiness  of  hand,  une  nettete  remarquable 
d' execution.  In  the  paintings  of  Frangois  Clouet,  for 
example,  or  rather  of  the  Clouets — for  there  was  a 
whole  family  of  them — painters  remarkable  for  their 
resistance  to  Italian  influences,  there  is  a  silveriness  of 
colour  and  a  clearness  of  expression  which  distinguish 
them  very  definitely  from  their  Flemish  neighbours, 
Hemling  or  the  Van  Eycks.  And  this  nicety  is  not 
less  characteristic  of  old  French  poetry.  A  light,  aerial 
delicacy,  a  simple  elegance — une  nettete  remarquable 
d3  execution:  these  are  essential  characteristics  alike  of 
Villon's  poetry,  and  of  the  Hours  of  Anne  of  Brittany. 
They  are  characteristic,  too,  of  a  hundred  French  Gothic 
carvings  and  traceries.  Alike  in  the  old  Gothic  cathe- 
drals, and  in  their  counterpart,  the  old  Gothic  chansons 
de  geste,  the  rough  and  ponderous  mass  becomes  as  if 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


by  passing  for  a  moment  into  happier  conditions,  or 
through  a  more  gracious  stratum  of  air,  graceful  and 
refined,  like  the  carved  ferneries  on  the  granite  church 
at  Folgoat,  or  the  lines  which  describe  the  fair  priestly 
hands  of  Archbishop  Turpin,  in  the  song  of  Roland; 
although  below  both  alike  there  is  a  fund  of  mere  Gothic 
strength,  or  heaviness.1 

Now,  Villon's  songs  and  Clouet's  painting  are  like 
these.  It  is  the  higher  touch  making  itself  felt  here 
and  there,  betraying  itself,  like  nobler  blood  in  a  lower 
stock,  by  a  fine  line  or  gesture  or  expression,  the  turn 
of  a  wrist,  the  tapering  of  a  finger.  In  Ronsard's  time 
that  rougher  element  seemed  likely  to  predominate.  No 
one  can  turn  over  the  pages  of  Rabelais  without  feeling 
how  much  need  there  was  of  softening,  of  castigation. 
To  effect  this  softening  is  the  object  of  the  revolution 
in  poetry  which  is  connected  with  Ronsard's  name. 
Casting  about  for  the  means  of  thus  refining  upon  and 
saving  the  character  of  French  literature,  he  accepted  that 
influx  of  Renaissance  taste,  which,  leaving  the  buildings, 
the  language,  the  art,  the  poetry  of  France,  at  bottom, 
what  they  were,  old  French  Gothic  still,  gilds  their  sur- 
faces with  a  strange,  delightful,  foreign  aspect  passing 
over  all  that  Northern  land,  in  itself  neither  deeper  nor 
more  permanent  than  a  chance  effect  of  light.  He 
reinforces,  he  doubles  the  French  daintiness  by  Italian 
finesse.  Thereupon,  nearly  all  the  force  and  all  the  seri- 
ousness of  French  work  disappear;  only  the  elegance, 
the  aerial  touch,  the  perfect  manner  remain.    But  this 

1The  purely  artistic  aspects  of  this  subject  have  been  inter- 
preted, in  a  work  of  great  taste  and  learning,  by  Mrs.  Mark 
Pattison: — The  Renaissance  of  Art  in  France. 


JOACHIM  DU  BELLAY  131 

elegance,  this  manner,  this  daintiness  of  execution  are 
consummate,  and  have  an  unmistakable  aesthetic  value. 

So  the  old  French  chanson,  which,  like  the  old  northern 
Gothic  ornament,  though  it  sometimes  refined  itself  into 
a  sort  of  weird  elegance,  was  often,  in  its  essence,  some- 
thing rude  and  formless,  became  in  the  hands  of  Ronsard 
a  Pindaric  ode.  He  gave  it  structure,  a  sustained  system, 
strophe  and  antistrophe,  and  taught  it  a  changefulness 
and  variety  of  metre  which  keep  the  curiosity  always 
excited,  so  that  the  very  aspect  of  it,  as  it  lies  written 
on  the  page,  carries  the  eye  lightly  onwards,  and  of 
which  this  is  a  good  instance : — 

Avril,  la  grace,  et  le  ris 

De  Cypris, 
Le  Hair  et  la  douce  haleine; 
Avril,  le  parfum  des  dieux, 

Qui,  des  cieux, 
Sentent  fodeur  de  la  plaine; 

Cest  toy,  courtois  et  gentil, 

Qui,  d'exil 
Retire  ces  passageres, 
Ces  arondelles  qui  vont, 

Et  qui  sont 
Du  printemps  les  messageres. 

That  is  not  by  Ronsard,  but  by  Remy  Belleau,  for 
Ronsard  soon  came  to  have  a  school.  Six  other  poets 
threw  in  their  lot  with  him  in  his  literary  revolution, — ' 
this  Remy  Belleau,  Antoine  de  Baif,  Pontus  de  Tyards 
fitienne  Jodelle,  Jean  Daurat,  and  lastly  Joachim  du 
Bellay;  and  with  that  strange  love  of  emblems  which 
is  characteristic  of  the  time,  which  covered  all  the  works 
of  Francis  the  First  with  the  salamander,  and  all  the 


132 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


works  of  Henry  the  Second  with  the  double  crescent, 
and  all  the  work  of  Anne  of  Brittany  with  the  knotted 
cord,  they  called  themselves  the  Pleiad;  seven  in  all, 
although,  as  happens  with  the  celestial  Pleiad,  if  you 
scrutinise  this  constellation  of  poets  more  carefully  you 
may  find  there  a  great  number  of  minor  stars. 

The  first  note  of  this  literary  revolution  was  struck 
by  Joachim  du  Bellay  in  a  little  tract  written  at  the 
early  age  of  twenty- four,  which  coming  to  us  through 
three  centuries  seems  of  yesterday,  so  full  is  it  of  those 
delicate  critical  distinctions  which  are  sometimes  sup- 
posed peculiar  to  modern  writers.  The  piece  has  for  its 
title  La  Deffense  et  Illustration  de  la  Langue  Frangoyse; 
and  its  problem  is  how  to  illustrate  or  ennoble  the  French 
language,  to  give  it  lustre.  We  are  accustomed  to  speak 
of  the  varied  critical  and  creative  movement  of  the  fif- 
teenth and  sixteenth  centuries  as  the  Renaissance,  and 
because  we  have  a  single  name  for  it  we  may  sometimes 
fancy  that  there  was  more  unity  in  the  thing  itself  than 
there  really  was.  Even  the  Reformation,  that  other 
great  movement  of  the  fifteenth  and  sixteenth  centuries, 
had  far  less  unity,  far  less  of  combined  action,  than 
is  at  first  sight  supposed;  and  the  Renaissance  was 
infinitely  less  united,  less  conscious  of  combined  action, 
than  the  Reformation.  But  if  anywhere  the  Renaissance 
became  conscious,  as  a  German  philosopher  might  say, 
if  ever  it  was  understood  as  a  systematic  movement  by 
those  who  took  part  in  it,  it  is  in  this  little  book  of 
Joachim  du  Bellay's,  which  it  is  impossible  to  read  with- 
out feeling  the  excitement,  the  animation,  of  change,  of 
discovery.  "It  is  a  remarkable  fact,"  says  M.  Sainte- 
Beuve,  "and  an  inversion  of  what  is  true  of  other  lan- 


JOACHIM  DU  BELLAY 


133 


guages,  that,  in  French,  prose  has  always  had  the  pre- 
cedence over  poetry."  Du  Bellay's  prose  is  perfectly 
transparent,  flexible,  and  chaste.  In  many  ways  it  is  a 
more  characteristic  example  of  the  culture  of  the  Pleiad 
than  any  of  its  verse;  and  those  who  love  the  whole 
movement  of  which  the  Pleiad  is  a  part,  for  a  weird 
foreign  grace  in  it,  and  may  be  looking  about  for  a 
true  specimen  of  it,  cannot  have  a  better  than  Joachim 
du  Bellay  and  this  little  treatise  of  his. 

Du  Bellay's  object  is  to  adjust  the  existing  French 
culture  to  the  rediscovered  classical  culture ;  and  in  dis- 
cussing this  problem,  and  developing  the  theories  of  the 
Pleiad,  he  has  lighted  upon  many  principles  of  perma- 
nent truth  and  applicability.  There  were  some  who 
despaired  of  the  French  language  altogether,  who  thought 
it  naturally  incapable  of  the  fulness  and  elegance  of 
Greek  and  Latin — cette  elegance  et  copie  qui  est  en  la 
langue  Greque  et  Romaine — that  science  could  be  ade- 
quately discussed,  and  poetry  nobly  written,  only  in  the 
dead  languages.  "Those  who  speak  thus,"  says  Du 
Bellay,  "make  me  think  of  the  relics  which  one  may 
only  see  through  a  little  pane  of  glass,  and  must  not 
touch  with  one's  hands.  That  is  what  these  people  do 
with  all  branches  of  culture,  which  they  keep  shut  up 
in  Greek  and  Latin  books,  not  permitting  one  to  see 
them  otherwise,  or  transport  them  out  of  dead  words  into 
those  which  are  alive,  and  wing  their  way  daily  through 
the  mouths  of  men."  "Languages,"  he  says  again,  "are 
not  born  like  plants  and  trees,  some  naturally  feeble  and 
sickly,  others  healthy  and  strong  and  apter  to  bear 
the  weight  of  men's  conceptions,  but  all  their  virtue  is 
generated  in  the  world  of  choice  and  men's  freewill 


134 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


concerning  them.  Therefore,  I  cannot  blame  too  strongly 
the  rashness  of  some  of  our  countrymen,  who  being 
anything  rather  than  Greeks  or  Latins,  depreciate  and 
reject  with  more  than  stoical  disdain  everything  written 
in  French ;  nor  can  I  express  my  surprise  at  the  odd 
opinion  of  some  learned  men  who  think  that  our  vulgar 
tongue  is  wholly  incapable  of  erudition  and  good  litera- 
ture." 

It  was  an  age  of  translations.  Du  Bellay  himself 
translated  two  books  of  the  2Eneid,  and  other  poetry, 
old  and  new,  and  there  were  some  who  thought  that  the 
translation  of  the  classical  literature  was  the  true  means 
bf  ennobling  the  French  language: — strangers  are  ever 
favourites  with  us — nous  favorisons  toujours  les  Stran- 
gers. Du  Bellay  moderates  their  expectations.  "I  do 
not  believe  that  one  can  learn  the  right  use  of  them" — 
he  is  speaking  of  figures  and  ornament  in  language — - 
"from  translations,  because  it  is  impossible  to  reproduce 
them  with  the  same  grace  with  which  the  original  author 
used  them.  For  each  language  has  I  know  not  what 
peculiarity  of  its  own;  and  if  you  force  yourself  to 
express  the  naturalness  (le  naif)  of  this  in  another  lan- 
guage, observing  the  law  of  translation, — not  to  expatiate 
beyond  the  limits  of  the  author  himself,  your  words  will 
be  constrained,  cold  and  ungraceful. "  Then  he  fixes 
the  test  of  all  good  translation: — "To  prove  this,  read 
me  Demosthenes  and  Homer  in  Latin,  Cicero  and  Virgil 
in  French,  and  see  whether  they  produce  in  you  the  same 
affections  which  you  experience  in  reading  those  authors 
in  the  original." 

In  this  effort  to  ennoble  the  French  language,  to  give 
it  grace,  number,  perfection,  and  as  painters  do  to  their 


JOACHIM  DU  BELLAY  135 

pictures,  that  last,  so  desirable,  touch — cette  dernih e 
main  que  nous  desirous — what  Du  Bellay  is  really  plead- 
ing for  is  his  mother-tongue,  the  language,  that  is,  in 
which  one  will  have  the  utmost  degree  of  what  is  mov- 
ing and  passionate.  He  recognised  of  what  force  the 
music  and  dignity  of  languages  are,  how  they  enter  into 
the  inmost  part  of  things;  and  in  pleading  for  the  cul- 
tivation of  the  French  language,  he  is  pleading  for  no 
merely  scholastic  interest,  but  for  freedom,  impulse, 
reality,  not  in  literature  only,  but  in  daily  communion  of 
speech.  After  all,  it  was  impossible  to  have  this  impulse 
in  Greek  and  Latin,  dead  languages  shut  up  in  books 
as  in  reliquaries — peris  et  mises  en  reliquaires  de  livres. 
By  aid  of  this  starveling  stock — pauvre  plante  et  vergette 
— of  the  French  language,  he  must  speak  delicately, 
movingly,  if  he  is  ever  to  speak  so  at  all :  that,  or  none, 
must  be  for  him  the  medium  of  what  he  calls,  in  one 
of  his  great  phrases,  le  discours  fatal  des  choses  mortr 
daines — that  discourse  about  affairs  which  decide  men's 
fates.  And  it  is  his  patriotism  not  to  despair  of  it;  he 
sees  it  already  perfect  in  all  elegance  and  beauty  of 
words — parfait  en  toute  elegance  et  venuste  de  paroles. 

Du  Bellay  was  born  in  the  disastrous  year  1525,  the 
year  of  the  battle  of  Pavia,  and  the  captivity  of  Francis 
the  First.  His  parents  died  early,  and  to  him,  as  the 
younger  son,  his  mother's  little  estate,  ce  petit  Lire,  the 
beloved  place  of  his  birth,  descended.  He  was  brought 
up  by  a  brother  only  a  little  older  than  himself ;  and  left 
to  themselves,  the  two  boys  passed  their  lives  in  day^ 
dreams  of  military  glory.  Their  education  was  neglected; 
"The  time  of  my  youth/'  says  Du  Bellay,  "was  lost, 
like  the  flower  which  no  shower  waters,  and  no  hand 


136 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


cultivates."  He  was  just  twenty  years  old  when  the 
elder  brother  died,  leaving  Joachim  to  be  the  guardian 
of  his  child.  It  was  with  regret,  with  a  shrinking  sense 
of  incapacity,  that  he  took  upon  him  the  burden  of  this 
responsibility.  Hitherto  he  had  looked  forward  to  the 
profession  of  a  soldier,  hereditary  in  his  family.  But  at 
this  time  a  sickness  attacked  him  which  brought  him 
cruel  sufferings,  and  seemed  likely  to  be  mortal.  It  was 
then  for  the  first  time  that  he  read  the  Greek  and  Latin 
poets.  These  studies  came  too  late  to  make  him  what 
he  so  much  desired  to  be,  a  trifler  in  Greek  and  Latin 
verse,  like  so  many  others  of  his  time  now  forgotten; 
instead,  they  made  him  a  lover  of  his  own  homely  native 
tongue,  that  poor  starveling  stock  of  the  French  language. 
It  was  through  this  fortunate  shortcoming  in  his  educa- 
tion that  he  became  national  and  modern ;  and  he  learned 
afterwards  to  look  back  on  that  wild  garden  of  his  youth 
with  only  a  half  regret.  A  certain  Cardinal  du  Bellay 
was  the  successful  member  of  the  family,  a  man  often 
employed  in  high  official  business.  To  him  the  thoughts 
of  Joachim  turned  when  it  became  necessary  to  choose  a 
profession,  and  in  1552  he  accompanied  the  Cardinal  to 
Rome.  He  remained  there  nearly  five  years,  burdened 
with  the  weight  of  affairs,  and  languishing  with  home- 
sickness. Yet  it  was  under  these  circumstances  that  his 
genius  yielded  its  best  fruits.  From  Rome,  so  full  of 
pleasurable  sensation  for  men  of  an  imaginative  tem- 
perament such  as  his,  with  all  the  curiosities  of  the 
Renaissance  still  fresh  in  it,  his  thoughts  went  back 
painfully,  longingly,  to  the  country  of  the  Loire,  with 
its  wide  expanse  of  waving  corn,  its  homely  pointed 
roofs  of  grey  slate,  and  its  far-off  scent  of  the  sea.  He 


JOACHIM  DU  BELLAY 


137 


reached  home  at  last,  but  only  to  die  there,  quite  sud- 
denly, one  wintry  day,  at  the  early  age  of  thirty-five. 

Much  of  Du  Bellay's  poetry  illustrates  rather  the  age 
and  school  to  which  he  belonged  than  his  own  temper 
and  genius.  As  with  the  writings  of  Ronsard  and  the 
other  poets  of  the  Pleiad,  its  interest  depends  not  so 
much  on  the  impress  of  individual  genius  upon  it,  as  on 
the  circumstance  that  it  was  once  poetry  a  la  mode, 
that  it  is  part  of  the  manner  of  a  time — a  time  which 
made  much  of  manner,  and  carried  it  to  a  high  degree 
of  perfection.  It  is  one  of  the  decorations  of  an  age 
which  threw  a  large  part  of  its  energy  into  the  work 
of  decoration.  We  feel  a  pensive  pleasure  in  gazing 
on  these  faded  adornments,  and  observing  how  a  group 
of  actual  men  and  women  pleased  themselves  long  ago. 
Ronsard's  poems  are  a  kind  of  epitome  of  his  age.  Of 
one  side  of  that  age,  it  is  true,  of  the  strenuous,  the 
progressive,  the  serious  movement,  which  was  then  going 
on,  there  is  little ;  but  of  the  catholic  side,  the  losing  side, 
the  forlorn  hope,  hardly  a  figure  is  absent.  The  Queen 
of  Scots,  at  whose  desire  Ronsard  published  his  odes, 
reading  him  in  her  northern  prison,  felt  that  he  was 
bringing  back  to  her  the  true  flavour  of  her  early  days 
in  the  court  of  Catherine  at  the  Louvre,  with  its  exotic 
Italian  gaieties.  Those  who  disliked  that  poetry,  dis- 
liked it  because  they  found  that  age  itself  distasteful. 
The  poetry  of  Malherbe  came,  with  its  sustained  style 
and  weighty  sentiment,  but  with  nothing  that  set  people 
singing;  and  the  lovers  of  such  poetry  saw  in  the  poetry 
of  the  Pleiad  only  the  latest  trumpery  of  the  middle  age. 
But  the  time  arrived  when  the  school  of  Malherbe  also 
had  had  its  day;  and  the  Romanticists,  who  in  their 


138 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


eagerness  for  excitement,  for  strange  music  and  imagery, 
went  back  to  the  works  of  the  middle  age,  accepted  the 
Pleiad,  too,  with  the  rest;  and  in  that  new  middle  age 
which  their  genius  has  evoked,  the  poetry  of  the  Pleiad 
has  found  its  place.  At  first,  with  Malherbe,  you  may 
think  it,  like  the  architecture,  the  whole  mode  of  life,  the 
very  dresses  of  that  time,  fantastic,  faded,  rococo.  But 
if  you  look  long  enough  to  understand  it,  to  conceive  its 
sentiment,  you  will  find  that  those  wanton  lines  have  a 
spirit  guiding  their  caprices.  For  there  is  style  there  ; 
one  temper  has  shaped  the  whole;  and  everything  that 
has  style,  that  has  been  done  as  no  other  man  or  age 
could  have  done  it,  as  it  could  never,  for  all  our  trying, 
be  done  again,  has  its  true  value  and  interest.  Let  us 
dwell  upon  it  for  a  moment,  and  try  to  gather  from  it  that 
special  flower,  ce  Hew  particulier,  which  Ronsard  him- 
self tells  us  every  garden  has. 

It  is  poetry  not  for  the  people,  but  for  a  confined 
circle,  for  courtiers,  great  lords  and  erudite  persons, 
people  who  desire  to  be  humoured,  to  gratify  a  certain 
refined  voluptuousness  they  have  in  them.  Ronsard  loves, 
or  dreams  that  he  loves,  a  rare  and  peculiar  type  of 
beauty,  le  petite  pucelle  Angevine,  with  golden  hair  and 
dark  eyes.  But  he  has  the  ambition  not  only  of  being 
a  courtier  and  a  lover,  but  a  great  scholar  also;  he  is 
anxious  about  orthography,  about  the  letter  e  Grecque, 
the  true  spelling  of  Latin  names  in  French  writing,  and 
the  restoration  of  the  letter  i  to  its  primitive  liberty — 
deV  i  voyelle  en  sa  premiere  liberte.  His  poetry  is  full 
of  quaint,  remote  learning.  He  is  just  a  little  pedantic, 
true  always  to  his  own  express  judgment,  that  to  be 
natural  is  not  enough  for  one  who  in  poetry  desires 


JOACHIM  DU  BELLAY 


139 


to  produce  work  worthy  of  immortality.  And  there- 
withal a  certain  number  of  Greek  words,  which  charmed 
Ronsard  and  his  circle  by  their  gaiety  and  daintiness, 
and  a  certain  air  of  foreign  elegance  about  them,  crept 
into  the  French  language;  as  there  were  other  strange 
words  which  the  poets  of  the  Pleiad  forged  for  them- 
selves, and  which  had  only  an  ephemeral  existence. 

With  this  was  united  the  desire  to  taste  a  more 
exquisite  and  various  music  than  that  of  the  old  French 
verse,  or  of  the  classical  poets.  The  music  of  the 
measured,  scanned  verse  of  Latin  and  Greek  poetry  is 
one  thing;  the  music  of  the  rhymed,  unscanned  verse  of 
Villon  and  the  old  French  poets,  la  poesie  chantee,  is 
another.  To  combine  these  two  kinds  of  music  in  a  new 
school  of  French  poetry,  to  make  verse  which  should  scan 
and  rhyme  as  well,  to  search  out  and  harmonise  the 
measure  of  every  syllable,  and  unite  it  to  the  swift,  flit^ 
ting,  swallow-like  motion  of  rhyme,  to  penetrate  their 
poetry  with  a  double  music — this  was  the  ambition  of 
the  Pleiad.  They  are  insatiable  of  music,  they  cannot 
have  enough  of  it;  they  desire  a  music  of  greater 
compass  perhaps  than  words  can  possibly  yield,  to  drain 
out  the  last  drops  of  sweetness  which  a  certain  note  or 
accent  contains. 

It  was  Goudimel,  the  serious  and  protestant  Goudimelv 
who  set  Ronsard's  songs  to  music;  but  except  in  this 
eagerness  for  music  the  poets  of  the  Pleiad  seem  never 
quite  in  earnest.  The  old  Greek  and  Roman  mythology, 
which  the  great  Italians  had  found  a  motive  so  weighty 
and  severe,  becomes  with  them  a  mere  toy.  That  "Lorcf 
of  terrible  aspect,"  Amor,  has  become  Love  the  boy,  or 
the  babe.    They  are  full  of  fine  railleries;  they  delight 


140  THE  RENAISSANCE 

in  diminutives,  ondelette,  fontelette,  doucelette,  Cassan- 
drette.  Their  loves  are  only  half  real,  a  vain  effort 
to  prolong  the  imaginative  loves  of  the  middle  age 
beyond  their  natural  lifetime.  They  write  love-poems 
for  hire.  Like  that  party  of  people  who  tell  the  tales 
in  Boccaccio's  Decameron,  they  form  a  circle  which  in 
an  age  of  great  troubles,  losses,  anxieties,  can  amuse 
itself  with  art,  poetry,  intrigue.  But  they  amuse 
themselves  with  wonderful  elegance.  And  sometimes 
their  gaiety  becomes  satiric,  for,  as  they  play,  real 
passions  insinuate  themselves,  and  at  least  the  reality  of 
death.  Their  dejection  at  the  thought  of  leaving  this 
fair  abode  of  our  common  daylight — le  beau  sejour  du 
commun  jour — is  expressed  by  them  with  almost  weari- 
some reiteration.  But  with  this  sentiment,  too,  they  are 
able  to  trifle.  The  imagery  of  death  serves  for  delicate 
ornament,  and  they  weave  into  the  airy  nothingness  of 
their  verses  their  trite  reflections  on  the  vanity  of  life. 
Just  so  the  grotesque  details  of  the  charnel-house  nest 
themselves,  together  with  birds  and  flowers  and  the 
fancies  of  the  pagan  mythology,  in  the  traceries  of  the 
architecture  of  that  time,  which  wantons  in  its  graceful 
arabesques  with  the  images  of  old  age  and  death. 

Ronsard  became  deaf  at  sixteen;  and  it  was  this 
circumstance  which  finally  determined  him  to  be  a  man 
of  letters  instead  of  a  diplomatist,  significantly,  one 
might  fancy,  of  a  certain  premature  agedness,  and  of 
the  tranquil,  temperate  sweetness  appropriate  to  that,  in 
the  school  of  poetry  which  he  founded.  Its  charm  is 
that  of  a  thing  not  vigorous  or  original,  but  full  of  the 
grace  which  comes  of  long  study  and  reiterated  refine- 
ments, and  many  steps  repeated,  and  many  angles  worn 


JOACHIM  DU  BELLAY 


141 


down,  with  an  exquisite  faintness,  une  fadeur  exquise, 
a  certain  tenuity  and  caducity,  as  for  those  who  can  bear 
nothing  vehement  or  strong;  for  princes  weary  of  love, 
like  Francis  the  First,  or  of  pleasure,  like  Henry  the 
Third,  or  of  action,  like  Henry  the  Fourth.  Its  merits 
are  those  of  the  old, — grace  and  finish,  perfect  in  minute 
detail.  For  these  people  are  a  little  jaded,  and  have 
a  constant  desire  for  a  subdued  and  delicate  excite- 
ment, to  warm  their  creeping  fancy  a  little.  They  love 
a  constant  change  of  rhyme  in  poetry,  and  in  their  houses 
that  strange,  fantastic  interweaving  of  thin,  reed-like 
lines,  which  are  a  kind  of  rhetoric  in  architecture. 

But  the  poetry  of  the  Pleiad  is  true  not  only  to  the 
physiognomy  of  its  age,  but  also  to  its  country — ce  pays 
du  Vendomois — the  names  and  scenery  of  which  so 
often  recur  in  it: — the  great  Loire,  with  its  long  spaces 
of  white  sand;  the  little  river  Loir;  the  heathy,  upland 
country,  with  its  scattered  pools  of  water  and  waste 
roadsides,  and  retired  manors,  with  their  crazy  old  feudal 
defences  half  fallen  into  decay;  La  Beauce,  where  the 
vast  rolling  fields  seem  to  anticipate  the  great  western 
sea  itself.  It  is  full  of  the  traits  of  that  country.  We 
see  Du  Bellay  and  Ronsard  gardening,  or  hunting  with 
their  dogs,  or  watch  the  pastimes  of  a  rainy  day;  and 
with  all  this  is  connected  a  domesticity,  a  homeliness 
and  simple  goodness,  by  which  the  Northern  country 
gains  upon  the  South.  They  have  the  love  of  the  aged 
for  warmth,  and  understand  the  poetry  of  winter;  for 
they  are  not  far  from  the  Atlantic,  and  the  west  wind 
which  comes  up  from  it,  turning  the  poplars  white,  spares 
not  this  new  Italy  in  France.  So  the  fireside  often 
appears,  with  the  pleasures  of  the  frosty  season,  about 


142  THE  RENAISSANCE 

the  vast  emblazoned  chimneys  of^  the  time,  and  with  a 
bonhomie  as  of  little  children,  -or  old  people. 

It  is  in  Du  Bellay's  Olive,  a  collection  of  sonnets  in 
praise  of  a  half-imaginary  lady,  Sonnet 2  a  la  louange 
d'Olive,  that  these  characteristics  are  most  abundant. 
Here  is  a  perfectly  crystallised  example : — 

D' amour,  de  grace,  et  de  haulte  valeur 

Les  feux  divins  estoient  ceinctz  et  les  cieulx 
S'estoient  vestuz  d'un  manteau  precieux 
A  raiz  ardens  de  diverse  couleur: 

Tout  estoit  plein  de  beaute,  de  bonheur, 
La  mer  tranquille,  et  le  vent  gracieulx, 
Quand  ceile  la  nasquit  en  ces  bas  lieux 
Qui  a  pille  du  monde  tout  Vhonneur. 

Eir  prist  son  teint  des  beux  lyz  blanchissans, 
Son  chef  de  I' or,  ses  deux  levres  des  rozes, 
Et  du  soleil  ses  yeux  resplandissans: 

Le  ciel  usant  de  liberalite, 

Mist  en  V esprit  ses  semences  encloses, 
Son  nom  des  Dieux  prist  I'immortalite. 

That  he  is  thus  a  characteristic  specimen  of  the  poetical 
taste  of  that  age,  is  indeed  Du  Bellay's  chief  interest.  But 
if  his  work  is  to  have  the  highest  sort  of  interest,  if  it 
is  to  do  something  more  than  satisfy  curiosity,  if  it  is 
to  have  an  aesthetic  as  distinct  from  an  historical  value, 
it  is  not  enough  for  a  poet  to  have  been  the  true  child  of 
his  age,  to  have  conformed  to  its  aesthetic  conditions, 
and  by  so  conforming  to  have  charmed  and  stimulated 
that  age ;  it  is  necessary  that  there  should  be  perceptible 
in  his  work  something  individual,  inventive,  unique,  the 
impress  there  of  the  writer's  own  temper  and  personality. 
This  impress  M.  Sainte-Beuve  thought  he  found  in  the 
Antiquites  de  Rome,  and  the  Regrets,  which  he  ranks 


JOACHIM  DU  BELLAY 


as  what  has  been  called  poesie  intime,  that  intensely 
modern  sort  of  poetry  in  which  the  writer  has  for 
his  aim  the  portraiture  of  his  own  most  intimate 
moods,  and  to  take  the  reader  into  his  confidence.  That 
age  had  other  instances  of  this  intimacy  of  sentiment: 
Montaigne's  Essays  are  full  of  it,  the  carvings  of  the 
church  of  Brou  are  full  of  it.  M.  Sainte-Beuve  has 
perhaps  exaggerated  the  influence  of  this  quality  in  Du 
Bellay's  Regrets;  but  the  very  name  of  the  book  has 
a  touch  of  Rousseau  about  it,  and  reminds  one  of  a 
whole  generation  of  self-pitying  poets  in  modern  times. 
It  was  in  the  atmosphere  of  Rome,  to  him  so  strange 
and  mournful,  that  these  pale  flowers  grew  up.  For  that 
journey  to  Italy,  which  he  deplored  as  the  greatest  mis- 
fortune of  his  life,  put  him  in  full  possession  of  his 
talent,  and  brought  out  all  its  originality.  And  in  effect 
you  do  find  intimacy,  intimite,  here.  The  trouble  of 
his  life  is  analysed,  and  the  sentiment  of  it  tonveyed. 
directly  to  our  minds ;  not  a  great  sorrow  or  passion,  but 
only  the  sense  of  loss  in  passing  days,  the  ennui  of  a 
dreamer  who  must  plunge  into  the  world's  affairs,  the 
opposition  between  actual  life  and  the  ideal,  a  longing 
for  rest,  nostalgia,  home-sickness — that  pre-eminently 
childish,  but  so  suggestive  sorrow,  as  significant  of  the 
final  regret  of  all  human  creatures  for  the  familiar  earth 
and  limited  sky. 

The  feeling  for  landscape  is  often  described  as  a 
modern  one ;  still  more  so  is  that  for  antiquity,  the  senti- 
ment of  ruins.  Du  Bellay  has  this  sentiment.  The 
duration  of  the  hard,  sharp  outlines  of  things  is  a  grief 
to  him,  and  passing  his  wearisome  days  among  the  ruins 
of  ancient  Rome,  he  is  consoled  by  the  thought  that  all 


144 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


must  one  day  end,  by  the  sentiment  of  the  grandeur  of 
nothingness — la  grandeur  du  rien.  With  a  strange  touch 
of  far-off  mysticism,  he  thinks  that  the  great  whole — 
le  grand  tout — into  which  all  other  things  pass  and  lose 
themselves,  ought  itself  sometimes  to  perish  and  pass 
away.  Nothing  less  can  relieve  his  weariness.  From  the 
stately  aspects  of  Rome  his  thoughts  went  back  con- 
tinually to  France,  to  the  smoking  chimneys  of  his  little 
village,  the  longer  twilight  of  the  North,  the  soft  climate 
of  Anjou — la  douceur  Angevine;  yet  not  so  much  to 
the  real  France,  we  may  be  sure,  with  its  dark  streets 
and  roofs  of  rough-hewn  slate,  as  to  that  other  country, 
with  slenderer  towers,  and  more  winding  rivers,  and  trees 
like  flowers,  and  with  softer  sunshine  on  more  grace- 
fully-proportioned fields  and  ways,  which  the  fancy  of 
the  exile,  and  the  pilgrim,  and  of  the  schooboy  far  from 
home,  and  of  those  kept  at  home  unwillingly,  everywhere 
builds  up  before  or  behind  them. 

He  came  home  at  last,  through  the  Grisons,  by  slow 
journeys;  and  there,  in  the  cooler  air  of  his  own  country, 
under  its  skies  of  milkier  blue,  the  sweetest  flower  of  his 
genius  sprang  up.  There  have  been  poets  whose  whole 
fame  has  rested  on  one  poem,  as  Gray's  on  the  Elegy  in  a 
Country  Churchyard,  or  Ronsard's,  as  many  critics  have 
thought,  on  the  eighteen  lines  of  one  famous  ode.  Du 
Bellay  has  almost  been  the  poet  of  one  poem;  and  this 
one  poem  of  his  is  an  Italian  product  transplanted  into 
that  green  country  of  Anjou;  out  of  the  Latin  verses  of 
Andrea  Navagero,  into  French.  But  it  is  a  composition 
in  which  the  matter  is  almost  nothing,  and  the  form 
almost  everything;  and  the  form  of  the  poem  as  if 
stands,  written  in  old  French,  is  all  Du  Bellay's  own. 


JOACHIM  DU  BELLAY 


145 


It  is  a  song  which  the  winnowers  are  supposed  to  sing 
a  they  winnow  the  corn,  and  they  invoke  the  winds  to 
lie  lightly  on  the  grain. 

D'UN  V ANN  EUR  DE  BLE  AUX  VENTS.1 

A  vous  trouppe  iecfere 
Qui  d'aile  passagere 
>    Par  le  monde  volez, 
Et  dyun  sifHant  murmur e 
L'  ombrageuse  verdure 
Doulcement  esbranlez. 

J'offre  ces  violettes, 

Ces  lis  &  ces  Heurettes, 
Et  ces  roses  icy, 
Ces  vermeillettes  roses 
Sont  freschement  ecloses, 
Et  ces  celliets  aussi. 

De  vostre  doulce  haleine 
Eventez  ceste  plaine 
Eventez  ce  sejour; 
Ce  pendant  que  fahanne 
A  mon  ble  que  je  vanne 
A  la  chaleur  du  jour. 

That  has,  in  the  highest  degree,  the  qualities,  the  value, 
of  the  whole  Pleiad  school  of  poetry,  of  the  whole 
phase  of  taste  from  which  that  school  derives — a  certain 
silvery  grace  of  fancy,  nearly  all  the  pleasure  of  which 
is  in  the  surprise  at  the  happy  and  dexterous  way  in 
which  a  thing  slight  in  itself  is  handled.   The  sweetness 

*A  graceful  translation  of  this  and  some  other  poems  of 
the  Pleiad  may  be  found  in  Ballads  and  Lyrics  of  Old 
France,  by  Mr.  Andrew  Lang. 


146 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


of  it  is  by  no  means  to  be  got  at  by  crushing,  as  you 
crush  wild  herbs  to  get  at  their  perfume.  One  seems 
to  hear  the  measured  motion  of  the  fans,  with  a  child's 
pleasure  on  coming  across  the  incident  for  the  first 
time,  in  one  of  those  great  barns  of  Du  Bellay's  own 
country,  La  Beauce,  the  granary  of  France.  A  sudden 
light  transfigures  some  trivial  thing,  a  weather-vane,  a 
windmill,  a  winnowing  fan,  the  dust  in  the  barn  door. 
A  moment — and  the  thing  has  vanished,  because  it  was 
pure  effect;  but  it  leaves  a  relish  behind  it,  a  longing 
that  the  accident  may  happen  again. 


WINCKELMANN 


ET  EGO   IN   ARCADIA  FUI 

Goethe's  fragments  of  art-criticism  contain  a  few 
pages  of  strange  pregnancy  on  the  character  of  Winckel- 
mann.  He  speaks  of  the  teacher  who  had  made  his 
career  possible,  but  whom  he  had  never  seen,  as  of  an 
abstract  type  of  culture,  consummate,  tranquil,  with- 
drawn already  into  the  region  of  ideals,  yet  retaining 
colour  from  the  incidents  of  a  passionate  intellectual  life* 
He  classes  him  with  certain  works  of  art,  possessing  an 
inexhaustible  gift  of  suggestion,  to  which  criticism  may 
return  again  and  again  with  renewed  freshness.  Hegel, 
in  his  lectures  on  the  Philosophy  of  Art,  estimating  the 
work  of  his  predecessors,  has  also  passed  a  remarkable 
judgment  on  Winckelmann's  writings: — "Winckelmann, 
by  contemplation  of  the  ideal  works  of  the  ancients, 
received  a  sort  of  inspiration,  through  which  he  opened 
a  new  sense  for  the  study  of  art.  He  is  to  be  regarded 
as  one  of  those  who,  in  the  sphere  of  art,  have  known 
how  to  initiate  a  new  organ  for  the  human  spirit."  That 
it  has  given  a  new  sense,  that  it  has  laid  open  a  new 
organ,  is  the  highest  that  can  be  said  of  any  critical 
effort.  It  is  interesting,  then,  to  ask  what  kind  of  man 
it  was  who  thus  laid  open  a  new  organ.  Under  what 
conditions  was  that  effected? 

Johann  Joachim  Winckelmann  was  born  at  Stendal 


148 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


in  Brandenburg,  in  the  year  1717.  The  child  of  a  poor 
tradesman,  he  passed  through  many  struggles  in  early 
youth,  the  memory  of  which  ever  remained  in  him  as 
a  fitful  cause  of  dejection.  In  1763,  in  the  full  emanci- 
pation of  his  spirit,  looking  over  the  beautiful  Roman 
prospect,  he  writes — "One  gets  spoiled  here;  but  God 
owed  me  this;  in  my  youth  I  suffered  too  much/1 
Destined  to  assert  and  interpret  the  charm  of  the 
Hellenic  spirit,  he  served  first  a  painful  apprenticeship  in 
the  tarnished  intellectual  world  of  Germany  in  the  earlier 
half  of  the  eighteenth  century.  Passing  out  of  that 
into  the  happy  light  of  the  antique,  he  had  a  sense  of 
exhilaration  almost  physical.  We  find  him  as  a  child 
in  the  dusky  precincts  of  a  German  school,  hungrily 
feeding  on  a  few  colourless  books.  The  master  of  this 
school  grows  blind;  Winckelmann  becomes  his  famulus. 
The  old  man  would  have  had  him  study  theology. 
Winckelmann,  free  of  the  master's  library,  chooses  rather 
to  become  familiar  with  the  Greek  classics.  Herodotus 
and  Homer  win,  with  their  "vowelled"  Greek,  his 
warmest  enthusiasm;  whole  nights  of  fever  are  devoted 
to  them;  disturbing  dreams  of  an  Odyssey  of  his  own 
come  to  him.  "He  felt  in  himself,"  says  Madame  de 
Stael,  "an  ardent  attraction  towards  the  south.  In  Ger- 
man imaginations  even  now  traces  are  often  to  be  found 
of  that  love  of  the  sun,  that  weariness  of  the  North 
(cette  fatigue  du  nord),  which  carried  the  northern 
peoples  away  into  the  countries  of  the  South.  A  fine 
sky  brings  to  birth  sentiments  not  unlike  the  love  of  one's 
Fatherland." 

To  most  of  us,  after  all  our  steps  towards  it,  the 
antique  world,  in  spite  of  its  intense  outlines,  its  own 


WINCKELMANN 


149 


perfect  self-expression,  still  remains  faint  and  remote. 
To  him,  closely  limited  except  on  the  side  of  the  ideal, 
building  for  his  dark  poverty  "a  house  not  made  with 
hands,"  it  early  came  to  seem  more  real  than  the  present. 
In  the  fantastic  plans  of  foreign  travel  continually 
passing  through  his  mind,  to  Egypt,  for  instance,  and  to 
France,  there  seems  always  to  be  rather  a  wistful  sense 
of  something  lost  to  be  regained,  than  the  desire  of  dis- 
covering anything  new.  Goethe  has  told  us  how,  in 
his  eagerness  actually  to  handle  the  antique,  he  became 
interested  in  the  insignificant  vestiges  of  it  which  the 
neighbourhood  of  Strasburg  afforded.  So  we  hear  of 
Winckelmann's  boyish  antiquarian  wanderings  among 
the  ugly  Brandenburg  sandhills.  Such  a  conformity 
between  himself  and  Winckelmann,  Goethe  would  have 
gladly  noted. 

At  twenty-one  he  enters  the  University  of  Halle,  to 
study  theology,  as  his  friends  desire ;  instead,  he  becomes 
the  enthusiastic  translator  of  Herodotus.  The  condition 
of  Greek  learning  in  German  schools  and  universities  had 
fallen,  and  there  were  no  professors  at  Halle  who  could 
satisfy  his  sharp,  intellectual  craving.  Of  his  profes- 
sional education  he  always  speaks  with  scorn,  claiming 
to  have  been  his  own  teacher  from  first  to  last.  His 
appointed  teachers  did  not  perceive  that  a  new  source 
of  culture  was  within  their  hands.  Homo  vagus  et 
inconstans! — one  of  them  pedantically  reports  of  the 
future  pilgrim  to  Rome,  unaware  on  which  side  his 
irony  was  whetted.  When  professional  education  confers 
nothing  but  irritation  on  a  Schiller,  no  one  ought  to  be 
surprised;  for  Schiller,  and  such  as  he,  are  primarily 
spiritual  adventurers.   But  that  Winckelmann,  the  votary 


*5° 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


of  the  gravest  of  intellectual  traditions,  should  get  noth-  j 
ing  but  an  attempt  at  suppression  from  the  professional  1 
guardians  of  learning,  is  what  may  well  surprise  us. 

In  1743  he  became  master  of  a  school  at  Seehausen.  I 
This  was  the  most  wearisome  period  of  his  life.    Not-  j 
withstanding  a  success,  in  dealing  with  children,  which 
•seems  to  testify  to  something  simple  and  primeval  in  his  j 
nature,  he  found  the  work  of  teaching  very  depressing. 
Engaged  in  this  work,  he  writes  that  he  still  has  within 
him  a  longing  desire  to  attain  to  the  knowledge  of  i 
beauty — sehnlich  wiinschte  zur  Kenntniss  des  Schdnen 
zu  gelangen.    He  had  to  shorten  his  nights,  sleeping  j 
only  four  hours,  to  gain  time  for  reading.    And  here 
Winckelmann  made  a  step  forward  in  culture.    He  I 
multiplied  his  intellectual  force  by  detaching  from  it  all 
flaccid  interests.  He  renounced  mathematics  and  law,  in 
which  his  reading  had  been  considerable, — all  but  the 
literature  of  the  arts.    Nothing  was  to  enter  into  his 
life  unpenetrated  by  its  central  enthusiasm.    At  this 
time  he  undergoes  the  charm  of  Voltaire.  Voltaire 
belongs  to  that  flimsier,  more  artificial,  classical  tradi- 
tion, which  Winckelmann  was  one  day  to  supplant,  by 
the  clear  ring,  the  eternal  outline,  of  the  genuine  antique. 
But  it  proves  the  authority  of  such  a  gift  as  Voltaire's 
that  it  allures  and  wins  even  those  born  to  supplant  it. 
Voltaire's  impression  on  Winckelmann  was  never  effaced ; 
and  it  gave  him  a  consideration  for  French  literature 
which  contrasts  with  his  contempt  for  the  literary 
products  of  Germany.    German  literature  transformed, 
siderealised,  as  we  see  it  in  Goethe,  reckons  Winckel- 
mann among  its  initiators.    But  Germany  at  that  time 
presented  nothing  in  which  he  could  have  anticipated 


W1NCKELM  ANN  1 5 1 

Iphigenie,  and  the  formation  of  an  effective  classical 
tradition  in  German  literature. 

Under  this  purely  literary  influence,  Winckelmann 
protests  against  Christian  Wolff  and  the  philosophers. 
Goethe,  in  speaking  of  this  protest,  alludes  to  his  own 
obligations  to  Emmanuel  Kant.  Kant's  influence  over  the 
culture  of  Goethe,  which  he  tells  us  could  not  have  been 
resisted  by  him  without  loss,  consisted  in  a  severe  limita- 
tion to  the  concrete.  But  he  adds,  that  in  born  anti- 
quaries, like  Winckelmann,  a  constant  handling  of  the 
antique,  with  its  eternal  outline,  maintains  that  limitation 
as  effiectually  as  a  critical  philosophy.  Plato,  however, 
saved  so  often  for  his  redeeming  literary  manner,  is 
excepted  from  Winckelmann's  proscription  of  the 
philosophers.  The  modern  student  most  often  meets 
Plato  on  that  side  which  seems  to  pass  beyond  Plato 
into  a  world  no  longer  pagan,  based  upon  the  conception 
of  a  spiritual  life.  But  the  element  of  affinity  which  he 
presents  to  Winckelmann  is  that  which  is  wholly  Greek, 
and  alien  from  the  Christian  world,  represented  by  that 
group  of  brilliant  youths  in  the  Lysis,  still  uninfected  by 
any  spiritual  sickness,  finding  the  end  of  all  endeavour 
in  the  aspects  of  the  human  form,  the  continual  stir  and 
motion  of  a  comely  human  life. 

This  new-found  interest  in  Plato's  dialogues  could 
not  fail  to  increase  his  desire  to  visit  the  countries  of  the 
classical  tradition.  "It  is  my  misfortune/'  he  writes, 
"that  I  was  not  born  to  great  place,  wherein  I  might  have 
had  cultivation,  and  the  opportunity  of  following  my 
instinct  and  forming  myself."  A  visit  to  Rome  prob- 
ably was  already  designed,  and  he  silently  preparing  for 
it.   Count  Biinau,  the  author  of  a  historical  work  then  of 


152  THE  RENAISSANCE 

note,  had  collected  at  Nothenitz  a  valuable  library,  now 
part  of  the  library  of  Dresden.  In  1748  Winckelmann 
wrote  to  Biinau  in  halting  French: — He  is  emboldened, 
he  says,  by  Biinau's  indulgence  for  needy  men  of  letters. 
He  desires  only  to  devote  himself  to  study,  having  never 
allowed  himself  to  be  dazzled  by  favourable  prospects 
in  the  Church.  He  hints  at  his  doubtful  position  "in  a 
metaphysical  .age,  by  which  humane  literature  is 
trampled  under  foot.  At  present,"  he  goes  on,  "little 
value  is  set  on  Greek  literature,  to  which  I  have  devoted 
myself  so  far  as  I  could  penetrate,  when  good  books  are 
so  scarce  and  expensive."  Finally,  he  desires  a  place  in 
some  corner  of  Biinau's  library.  "Perhaps,  at  some 
future  time,  I  shall  become  more  useful  to  the  public, 
if,  drawn  from  obscurity  in  whatever  way,  I  can  find 
means  to  maintain  myself  in  the  capital." 

Soon  afterwards  we  find  Winckelmann  in  the  library 
at  Nothenitz.  Thence  he  made  many  visits  to  the  collec- 
tion of  antiquities  at  Dresden.  He  became  acquainted 
with  many  artists,  above  all  with  Oeser,  Goethe's  future 
friend  and  master,  who,  uniting  a  high  culture  with  the 
practical  knowledge  of  art,  was  fitted  to  minister  to 
Winckelmann's  culture.  And  now  a  new  channel  of 
communion  with  the  Greek  life  was  opened  for  him. 
Hitherto  he  had  handled  the  words  only  of  Greek  poetry, 
stirred  indeed  and  roused  by  them,  yet  divining  beyond 
the  words  some  unexpressed  pulsation  of  sensuous  life. 
Suddenly  he  is  in  contact  with  that  life,  still  fervent  in 
the  relics  of  plastic  art.  Filled  as  our  culture  is  with 
the  classical  spirit,  we  can  hardly  imagine  how  deeply 
the  human  mind  was  moved,  when,  at  the  Renaissance, 
in  the  midst  of  a  frozen  world,  the  buried  fire  of  ancient 


WINCKELMANN 


153 


art  rose  up  from  under  the  soil.  Winckelmann  here 
reproduces  for  us  the  earlier  sentiment  of  the  Renais- 
sance. On  a  sudden  the  imagination  feels  itself  free. 
How  facile  and  direct,  it  seems  to  say,  is  this  life  of  the 
senses  and  the  understanding,  when  once  we  have  appre- 
hended it !  Here,  surely,  is  that  .more  liberal  mode  of 
life  we  have  been  seeking  so  long,  so  near  to  us  all  the 
while.  How  mistaken  and  .roundabout  have  been  our 
efforts  to  reach  it  by  mystic  passion,  and  monastic 
reverie;  how  they  have  deflowered  the  flesh;  how  little 
have  they  really  emancipated  us !  Hermione  melts  from 
her  stony  posture,  and  the  lost  proportions  of  life  right 
themselves.  Here,  then,  in  vivid  realisation  we  see  the 
native  tendency  of  Winckelmann  to  escape  from  abstract 
theory  to  intuition,  to  the  exercise  of  sight  and  touch. 
Lessing,  in  the  Laocoon,  has  theorised  finely  on  the 
relation  of  poetry  to  sculpture;  and  philosophy  may 
give  us  theoretical  reasons  why  not  poetry  but  sculpture 
should  be  the  most  sincere  and  exact  expression  of  the 
Greek  ideal.  By  a  happy,  unperplexed  dexterity, 
Winckelmann  solves  the  question  in  the  concrete.  It  is 
what  Goethe  calls  his  Gewahrwerden  der  griechischen 
Kunst,  his  finding  of  Greek  art. 

Through  the  tumultuous  richness  of  Goethe's  culture, 
the  influence  of  Winckelmann  is  always  discernible,  as 
the  strong,  regulative  under-current  of  a  clear,  antique 
motive.  "One  learns  nothing  from  him,"  he  says  to 
Eckermann,  "but  one  becomes  something."  If  we  ask 
what  the  secret  of  this  influence  was,  Goethe  himself 
will  tell  us — wholeness,  unity  with  one's  self,  intellec- 
tual integrity.  And  yet  these  expressions,  because  they 
fit  Goethe,  with  his  universal  culture,  so  well,  seem  hardly 


*54 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


to  describe  the  narrow,  exclusive  interest  of  Winckel- 
mann.  Doubtless  Winckelmann's  perfection  is  a  narrow 
perfection:  his  feverish  nursing  of  the  one  motive  of 
his  life  is  a  contrast  to  Goethe's  various  energy.  But 
what  affected  Goethe,  what  instructed  him  and  ministered 
to  his  culture,  was  the  integrity,  the  truth  to  its  type,  of 
the  given  force.  The  development  of  this  force  was  the 
single  interest  of  Winckelmann,  unembarrassed  by  any- 
thing else  in  him.  Other  interests,  practical  or  intellec- 
tual, those  slighter  talents  and  motives  not  supreme, 
which  in  most  men  are  the  waste  part  of  nature,  and 
drain  away  their  vitality,  he  plucked  out  and  cast  from 
him.  The  protracted  longing  of  his  youth  is  not  a 
vague,  romantic  longing:  he  knows  what  he  longs  for, 
what  he  wills.  Within  its  severe  limits  his  enthusiasm 
burns  like  lava.  "You  know/'  says  Lavater,  speaking 
of  Winckelmann's  countenance,  "that  I  consider  ardor 
and  indifference  by  no  means  incompatible  in  the  same 
character.  If  ever  there  was  a  striking  instance  of  that 
union,  it  is  in  the  countenance  before  us."  "A  lowly 
childhood,"  says  Goethe,  "insufficient  instruction  in 
youth,  broken,  distracted  studies  in  early  manhood,  the 
burden  of  school-keeping!  He  was  thirty  years  old 
before  he  enjoyed  a  single  favor  of  fortune:  but  so 
soon  as  he  had  attained  to  an  adequate  condition  of 
freedom,  he  appears  before  us  consummate  and  entire, 
complete  in  the  ancient  sense." 

But  his  hair  is  turning  grey,  and  he  has  not  yet  reached 
the  south.  The  Saxon  court  had  become  Roman 
Catholic,  and  the  way  to  favour  at  Dresden  was  through 
Roman  ecclesiastics.  Probably  the  thought  of  a  pro- 
fession of  the  papal  religion  was  not  new  to  Winckel- 


WINCKELM  AN  N 


155 


mann.  At  one  time  he  had  thought  of  begging  his  way 
to  Rome,  from  cloister  to  cloister,  under  the  pretence  of 
a  disposition  to  change  his  faith.  In  1751,  the  papal 
nuncio,  Archinto,  was  one  of  the  visitors  at  Ndthenitz. 
He  suggested  Rome  as  the  fitting  stage  for  Winckel- 
mann's  accomplishments  and  held  out  the  hope  of  a 
place  in  the  Pope's  library.  Cardinal  Passionei,  charmed 
with  Winckelmann's  beautiful  Greek  writing,  was  ready 
to  play  the  part  of  Maecenas,  if  the  indispensable  change 
were  made.  Winckelmann  accepted  the  bribe,  and  visited 
the  nuncio  at  Dresden.  Unquiet  still  at  the  word  "pro- 
fession," not  without  a  struggle,  he  joined  the  Roman 
Church,  July  the  nth,  1754. 

Goethe  boldly  pleads  that  Winckelmann  was  a  pagan, 
that  the  landmarks  of  Christendom  meant  nothing  to 
him.  It  is  clear  that  he  intended  to  deceive  no  one  by 
his  disguise;  fears  of  the  inquisition  are  sometimes 
visible  during  his  life  in  Rome;  he  entered  Rome 
notoriously  with  the  works  of  Voltaire  in  his  possession ; 
the  thought  of  what  Count  Biinau  might  be  thinking 
of  him  seems  to  have  been  his  greatest  difficulty.  On 
the  other  hand,  he  may  have  had  a  sense  of  a  certain 
antique  and  as  it  were  pagan  grandeur  in  the  Roman 
Catholic  religion.  Turning  from  the  crabbed  Protes- 
tantism, which  had  been  the  ennui  of  his  youth,  he 
might  reflect  that  while  Rome  had  reconciled  itself  to 
the  Renaissance,  the  Protestant  principle  in  art  had 
cut  off  Germany  from  the  supreme  tradition  of  beauty. 
And  yet  to  that  transparent  nature,  with  its  simplicity 
as  of  the  earlier  world,  the  loss  of  absolute  sincerity 
must  have  been  a  real  loss.  Goethe  understands  that 
Winckelmann  had  made  this  sacrifice.   Yet  at  the  bar  of 


156  THE  RENAISSANCE  v 

the  highest  criticism,  perhaps,  Winckelmann  may  be 
absolved.  The  insincerity  of  his  religious  profession  was 
only  one  incident  of  a  culture  in  which  the  moral  instinct, 
like  the  religious  or  political,  was  merged  in  the  artistic. 
But  then  the  artistic  interest  was  that,  by  desperate 
faithfulness  to  which  Winckelmann  was  saved  from  the 
mediocrity,  which,  breaking  through  no  bounds,  moves 
ever  in  a  bloodless  routine,  and  misses  its  one  chance  in 
the  life  of  the  spirit  and  the  intellect.  There  have  been 
instances  of  culture  developed  by  every  high  motive  in 
turn,  and  yet  intense  at  every  point ;  and  the  aim  of  our 
culture  should  be  to  attain  not  only  as  intense  but  as 
complete  a  life  as  possible.  But  often  the  higher  life 
is  only  possible  at  all,  on  condition  of  the  selection  of 
that  in  which  one's  motive  is  native  and  strong ;  and  this 
selection  involves  the  renunciation  of  a  crown  reserved 
for  others.  Which  is  better? — to  lay  open  a  new  sense, 
to  initiate  a  new  organ  for  the  human  spirit,  or  to 
cultivate  many  types  of  perfection  up  to  a  point  which 
leaves  us  still  beyond  the  range  of  their  transforming 
power?  Savonarola  is  one  type  of  success;  Winckel- 
mann is  another;  criticism  can  reject  neither,  because 
each  is  true  to  tiself .  Winckelmann  himself  explains  the 
motive  of  his  life  when  he  says,  "It  will  be  my  highest 
reward,  if  posterity  acknowledges  that  I  have  written 
worthily." 

For  a  time  he  remained  at  Dresden.  There  his  first 
book  appeared,  Thoughts  on  the  Imitation  of  Greek 
Works  of  Art  in  Painting  and  Sculpture.  Full  of 
obscurities  as  it  was,  obscurities  which  baffled  but  did 
not  offend  Goethe  when  he  first  turned  to  art-criticism, 
its  purpose  was  direct — an  appeal  from  the  artificial 


WINCKELMANN 


157 


classicism  of  the  day  to  the  study  of  the  antique.  The 
book  was  well  received,  and  a  pension  supplied  through 
the  king's  confessor.  In  September  1755  he  started  fof 
Rome,  in  the  company  of  a  young  Jesuit.  He  was 
introduced  to  Raphael  Mengs,  a  painter  then  of  note, 
and  found  a  home  near  him,  in  the  artists'  quarter,  in 
a  place  where  he  could  "overlook,  far  and  wide,  the 
eternal  city."  At  first  he  was  perplexed  with  the  sense 
of  being  a  stranger  on  what  was  to  him,  spiritually, 
native  soil.  "Unhappily,"  he  cries  in  French,  often 
selected  by  him  as  the  vehicle  of  strong  feeling,  "I  am 
one  of  those  whom  the  Greeks  call  bypuxadeh. — I  have 
come  into  the  world  and  into  Italy  too  late."  More  than 
thirty  ears  afterwards,  Goethe  also,  after  many  aspira- 
tions and  severe  preparation  of  mind,  visited  Italy.  In 
early  manhood,  just  as  he,  too,  was  finding  Greek  art, 
the  rumour  of  that  true  artist's  life  of  Winckelmann  in 
Italy  had  strongly  moved  him.  At  Rome,  spending  a 
whole  year  drawing  from  the  antique,  in  preparation  for 
Iphigenie,  he  finds  the  stimulus  of  Winckelmann's 
memory  ever  active.  Winckelmann's  Roman  life  was 
simple,  primeval,  Greek.  His  delicate  constitution  per- 
mitted him  the  use  only  of  bread  and  wine.  Condemned 
by  many  as  a  renegade,  he  had  no  desire  for  places  of 
honour,  but  only  to  see  his  merits  acknowledged,  and 
existence  assured  to  him.  He  was  simple  without  being 
niggardly ;  he  desired  to  be  neither  poor  nor  rich. 

Winckelmann's  first  years  in  Rome  present  all  the 
elements  of  an  intellectual  situation  of  the  highest 
interest.  The  beating  of  the  soul  against  its  bars,  the 
sombre  aspect,  the  alien  traditions,  the  still  barbarous 
literature  of  Germany,  are  afar  off;  before  him  are 


158 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


adequate  conditions  of  culture,  the  sacred  soil  itself,  the 
first  tokens  of  the  advent  of  the  new  German  literature, 
with  its  broad  horizons,  its  boundless  intellectual  promise. 
Dante,  passing  from  the  darkness  of  the  Inferno,  is  filled 
with  a  sharp  and  joyful  sense  of  light,  which  makes  him 
deal  with  it,  in  the  opening  of  the  Purgatorio,  in  a 
wonderfully  touching  and  penetrative  way.  Hellenism, 
which  is  the  principle  pre-eminently  of  intellectual  light 
(our  modern  culture  may  have  more  colour,  the  medieval 
spirit  greater  heat  and  profundity,  but  Hellenism 
is  pre-eminent  for  light),  has  always  been  most 
effectively  conceived  by  those  who  have  crept  into  it 
out  of  an  intellectual  world  in  which  the  sombre  elements 
predominate.  So  it  had  been  in  the  ages  of  the  Renais- 
sance. This  repression,  removed  at  last,  gave  force 
and  glow  to  Winckelmann's  native  affinity  to  the  Hellenic 
spirit.  "There  had  been  known  before  him,"  says 
Madame  de  Stael,  "learned  men  who  might  be  consulted 
like  books ;  but  no  one  had,  if  I  may  say  so,  made  himself 
a  pagan  for  the  purpose  of  penetrating  antiquity."  "One 
is  always  a  poor  executant  of  conceptions  not  one's 
own." — On  execute  mat  ce  qu'on  n'a  pas  congu  soi-meme1 
— are  true  in  their  measure  of  every  genuine  enthusiasm. 
Enthusiasm, — that,  in  the  broad  Platonic  sense  of  the 
Phaedrus,  was  the  secret  of  his  divinatory  power  over 
the  Hellenic  world.  This  enthusiasm,  dependent  as  it 
is  to  a  great  degree  on  bodily  temperament,  has  a  power 
of  re-enforcing  the  purer  emotions  of  the  intellect  with 
an  almost  physical  excitement.  That  his  affinity  with 
Hellenism  was  not  merely  intellectual,  that  the  subtler 
threads  of  temperament  wrere  inwoven  in  it,  is  proved 
1  Words  of  Charlotte  Corday  before  the  Convention. 


WINCKELMANN 


by  his  romantic,  fervent  friendships  with  young  men. 
He  has  known,  he  says,  many  young  men  more  beautiful 
than  Guido's  archangel.  These  friendships,  bringing  him 
into  contact  with  the  pride  of  human  form,  and  staining 
the  thoughts  with  its  bloom,  perfected  his  reconciliation 
to  the  spirit  of  Greek  sculpture.  A  letter  on  taste, 
addressed  from  Rome  to  a  young  nobleman,  Friedrich 
von  Berg,  is  the  record  of  such  a  friendship. 

"I  shall  excuse  my  delay/'  he  begins,  "in  fulfilling  my 
promise  of  an  essay  on  the  taste  for  beauty  in  works  of 
art,  in  the  words  of  Pindar.  He  says  to  Agesidamus,  a 
youth  of  Locri — Ideq,  re  kclXov,  &pq  re  KeKpajxevov — whom 
he  had  kept  waiting  for  an  intended  ode,  that  a  debt 
paid  with  usury  is  the  end  of  reproach.  This  may  win 
your  good-nature  on  behalf  of  my  present  essay,  which 
has  turned  out  far  more  detailed  and  circumstantial 
than  I  had  at  first  intended. 

"It  is  from  yourself  that  the  subject  is  taken.  Our 
intercourse  has  been  short,  too  short  both  for  you  and 
me;  but  the  first  time  I  saw  you,  the  affinity  of  our 
spirits  was  revealed  to  me :  your  culture  proved  that  my 
hope  was  not  groundless;  and  I  found  in  a  beautiful 
body  a  soul  created  for  nobleness,  gifted  with  the  sense 
of  beauty.  My  parting  from  you  was,  therefore,  one  of 
the  most  painful  in  my  life;  and  that  this  feeling  con- 
tinues our  common  friend  is  witness,  for  your  separa- 
tion from  me  leaves  me  no  hope  of  seeing  you  again. 
Let  this  essay  be  a  memorial  of  our  .friendship,  which, 
on  my  side,  is  free  from  every  selfish  motive,  and  ever 
remains  subject  and  dedicate  to  yourself  alone." 

The  following  passage  is  characteristic — 

"As  it  is  confessedly  the  beauty  of  man  which  is  to 


i6o 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


be  conceived  under  one  general  idea,  so  I  have  noticed 
that  those  who  are  observant  of  beauty  only  in  women, 
and  are  moved  little  or  not  at  all  by  the  beauty  of  men, 
seldom  have  an  impartial,  vital,  inborn  instinct  for 
beauty  in  art.  To  such  persons  the  beauty  of  Greek 
art  will  ever  seem  wanting,  because  its  supreme  beauty 
is  rather  male  than  female.  But  the  beauty  of  art 
demands  a  higher  sensibility  than  the  beauty  of  nature, 
because  the  beauty  of  art,  like  tears  shed  at  a  play,  gives 
no  pain,  is  without  life,  and  must  be  awakened  and 
repaired  by  culture.  Now,  as  the  spirit  of  culture  is 
much  more  ardent  in  youth  than  in  manhood,  the  instinct 
of  which  I  am  speaking  must  be  exercised  and  directed 
to  what  is  beautiful,  before  that  age  is  reached,  at  which 
one  would  be  afraid  to  confess  that  one  had  no  taste 
for  it" 

Certainly,  of  that  beauty  of  living  form  which  regu- 
lated Winckelmann's  friendships,  it  could  not  be  said 
that  it  gave  no  pain.  One  notable  friendship,  the  fortune 
of  which  we  may  trace  through  his  letters,  begins  with 
an  antique,  chivalrous  letter  in  French,  and  ends  noisily 
in  a  burst  of  angry  fire.  Far  from  reaching  the  quietism, 
the  bland  indifference  of  art,  such  attachments  are  never- 
theless more  susceptible  than  any  others  of  equal  strength 
of  a  purely  intellectual  culture.  Of  passion,  of  physical 
excitement,  they  contain  only  just  so  much  as  stimulates 
the  eye  to  the  finest  delicacies  of  colour  and  form.  These 
friendships,  often  the  caprices  of  a  moment,  make 
Winckelmann's  letters,  with  their  troubled  colouring,  an 
instructive  but  bizarre  addition  to  the  History  of  Art, 
that  shrine  of  grave  and  mellow  light  around  the  mute 
Olympian  family.   The  impression  which  Winckelmann's 


WINCKELMANN 


161 


literary  life  conveyed  to  those  about  him  was  that  of 
excitement,  intuition,  inspiration  of  general  principles. 
The  quick,  susceptible  enthusiast,  betraying  his  tempera- 
ment even  in  appearance,  by  his  olive  complexion,  his 
deep-seated,  piercing  eyes,  his  rapid  movements,  appre- 
hended the  subtlest  principles  of  the  Hellenic  manner, 
not  through  the  understanding,  but  by  instinct  or  touch. 
A  German  biographer  of  Winckelmann  has  compared 
him  to  Columbus.  That  is  not  the  aptest  of  comparisons ; 
but  it  reminds  one  of  a  passage  in  which  Edgar  Quinet 
describes  the  great  discoverer's  famous  voyage.  His 
science  was  often  at  fault;  but  he  had  a  way  of  esti- 
mating at  once  the  slightest  indication  of  land,  in  a 
floating  weed  or  passing  bird;  he  seemed  actually  to 
come  nearer  to  nature  than  other  men.  And  that  world 
in  which  others  had  moved  with  so  much  embarrassment, 
seems  to  call  out  in  Winckelmann  new  senses  fitted  to 
deal  with  it.  He  is  in  touch  with  it;  it  penetrates  him, 
and  becomes  part  of  his  temperament.  He  remodels 
his  writings  with  constant  renewal  of  insight ;  he  catches 
the  thread  of  a  whole  sequence  of  laws  in  some  hollowing 
of  the  hand,  or  dividing  of  the  hair ;  he  seems  to  realise 
that  fancy  of  the  reminiscence  of  a  forgotten  knowledge 
hidden  for  a  time  in  the  mind  itself ;  as  if  the  mind  of 
one,  lover  and  philosopher  at  once  in  some  phase  of 
pre-existence —  ^iKoao^rjaas  Tore  ixkr  epcoros  — fallen  into 
a  new  cycle,  were  beginning  its  intellectual  career 
over  again,  yet  with  a  certain  power  of  anticipating 
its  results.  So  comes  the  truth  of  Goethe's  judgments 
on  his  works;  they  are  a  life,  a  living  thing,  designed 
for  those  who  are  alive — ein  Lebendiges  fur  die  Leberir 
digen  geschrieben,  ein  Leben  selbst. 


l62 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


In  1758  Cardinal  Albani,  who  had  formed  in  his 
Roman  villa  a  precious  collection  of  antiquities,  became 
Winckelmann's  patron.  Pompeii  had  just  opened  its 
treasures;  Winckelmann  gathered  its  first  fruits.  But 
his  plan  of  a  visit  to  Greece  remained  unfulfilled.  From 
his  first  arrival  in  Rome  he  had  kept  the  History  of 
Ancient  Art  ever  in  view.  All  his  other  writings  were 
a  preparation  for  that.  It  appeared,  finally,  in  1764;  but 
even  after  its  publication  Winckelmann  was  still 
employed  in  perfecting  it.  It  is  since  his  time  that  many 
of  the  most  significant  examples  of  Greek  art  have  been 
submitted  to  criticism.  He  had  seen  little  or  nothing  of 
what  we  ascribe  to  the  age  of  Pheidias;  and  his  con- 
ception of  Greek  art  tends,  therefore,  to  put  the  mere 
elegance  of  the  imperial  society  of  ancient  Rome  in 
place  of  the  severe  and  chastened  grace  of  the  palaestra. 
For  the  most  part  he  had  to  penetrate  to  Greek  art 
through  copies,  imitations,  and  later  Roman  art  itself ; 
and  it  is  not  surprising  that  this  turbid  medium  has  left 
in  Winckelmann's  actual  results  much  that  a  more 
privileged  criticism  can  correct. 

He  had  been  twelve  years  in  Rome.  Admiring  Ger- 
many had  made  many  calls  to  him.  At  last,  in  1768, 
he  set  out  to  revisit  the  country  of  his  birth ;  and  as  he 
left  Rome,  a  strange,  inverted  home-sickness,  a  strange 
reluctance  to  leave  it  at  all,  came  over  him.  He  reached 
Vienna.  There  he  was  loaded  with  honours  and  presents : 
other  cities  were  awaiting  him.  Goethe,  then  nineteen 
years  old,  studying  art  at  Leipsic,  was  expecting  his 
coming,  with  that  wistful  eagerness  which  marked  his 
youth,  when  the  news  of  Winckelmann's  murder  arrived. 
All  his  "weariness  of  the  North"  had  revived  with 


WINCKELMANN  163 

double  force.  He  left  Vienna,  intending  to  hasten  back 
to  Rome,  and  at  Trieste  a  delay  of  a  few  days  occurred. 
With  characteristic  openness,  Winckelmann  had  confided 
his  plans  to  a  fellow-traveller,  a  man  named  Arcangeli, 
and  had  shown  him  the  gold  medals  received  at  Vienna. 
Arcangeli's  avarice  was  aroused.  One  morning  he 
entered  Winckelmann's  room,  under  pretence  of  taking 
leave.  Winckelmann  was  then  writing  "memoranda  for 
the  future  editor  of  the  History  of  Art,"  still  seeking  the 
perfection  of  his  great  work.  Arcangeli  begged  to  see 
the  medals  once  more.  As  Winckelmann  stooped  down 
to  take  them  from  the  chest,  a  cord  was  thrown  round 
his  neck.  Some  time  afterwards,  a  child  with  whose 
(companionship  Winckelmann  had  beguiled  his  delay< 
knocked  at  the  door,  and  receiving  no  answer,  gave  th$ 
alarm.  Winckelmann  was  found  dangerously  wounded! 
and  died  a  few  hours  later,  after  receiving  the  last 
sacraments.  It  seemed  as  if  the  gods,  in  reward  fof: 
his  devotion  to  them,  had  given  him  a  death  which,  for 
its  swiftness  and  its  opportunity,  he  might  well  have 
desired.  "He  has,"  says  Goethe,  "the  advantage  of 
figuring  in  the  memory  of  posterity,  as  one  eternally  able 
and  strong;  for  the  image  in  which  one  leaves  the  work) 
is  that  in  which  one  moves  among  the  shadows."  Yet, 
perhaps,  it  is  not  fanciful  to  regret  that  his  proposed 
meeting  with  Goethe  never  took  place.  Goethe,  then  in 
all  the  pregnancy  of  his  wonderful  youth,  still  unruffled 
by  the  "stress  and  storm"  of  his  earlier  manhood,  was 
awaiting  Winckelmann  with  a  curiosity  of  the  worthiest 
kind.  As  it  was,  Winckelmann  became  to  him  something 
like  what  Virgil  was  to  Dante.  And  Winckelmann,  with 
his  fiery  friendships,  had  reached  that  age  and  that  period 


164 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


of  culture  at  which  emotions  hitherto  fitful,  sometimes 
concentrate  themselves  in  a  vital,  unchangeable  relation- 
ship. German  literary  history  seems  to  have  lost  the 
chance  of  one  of  those  famous  friendships,  the  very 
tradition  of  which  becomes  a  stimulus  to  culture,  and 
exercises  an  imperishable  influence. 

In  one  of  the  frescoes  of  the  Vatican,  Raphael  has 
commemorated  the  tradition  of  the  Catholic  religion. 
Against  a  space  of  tranquil  sky,  broken  in  upon  by  the 
beatific  vision,  are  ranged  the  great  personages  of 
Christian  history,  with  the  Sacrament  in  the  midst. 
Another  fresco  of  Raphael  in  the  same  apartment  pre- 
sents a  very  different  company,  Dante  alone  appearing  in 
both.  Surrounded  by  the  muses  of  Greek  mythology, 
under  a  thicket  of  laurel,  sits  Apollo,  with  the  sources 
of  Castalia  at  his  feet.  On  either  side  are  grouped  those 
on  whom  the  spirit  of  Apollo  descended,  the  classical 
and  Renaissance  poets,  to  whom  the  waters  of  Castalia 
come  down,  a  river  making  glad  this  other  "city  of 
God."  In  this  fresco  it  is  the  classical  tradition,  the 
orthodoxy  of  taste,  that  Raphael  commemorates.  Winck- 
elmann's  intellectual  history  authenticates  the  claims  of 
this  tradition  in  human  culture.  In  the  countries  where 
that  tradition  arose,  where  it  still  lurked  about  its  own 
artistic  relics,  and  changes  of  language  had  not  broken 
i  its  continuity,  national  pride  might  sometimes  light  up 
anew  an  enthusiasm  for  it.  Aliens  might  imitate  that 
enthusiasm,  and  classicism  become  from  time  to  time  an 
intellectual  fashion.  But  Winckelmann  was  not  further 
removed  by  language,  than  by  local  aspects  and  associa- 
tions, from  those  vestiges  of  the  classical  spirit;  and  he 


WINCKELMANN 


165 


lived  at  a  time  when,  in  Germany,  classical  studies  were 
out  of  favour.  Yet,  remote  in  time  and  place,  he  feels 
after  the  Hellenic  world,  divines  those  channels  of  an- 
cient art,  in  which  its  life  still  circulates,  and,  like  Scyles, 
the  half-barbarous  yet  Hellenising  king,  in  the  beautiful 
story  of  Herodotus,  is  irresistibly  attracted  by  it.  This 
testimony  to  the  authority  of  the  Hellenic  tradition,  its 
fitness  to  satisfy  some  vital  requirement  of  the  intellect, 
which  Winckelmann  contributes  as  a  solitary  man  of 
genius,  is  offered  also  by  the  general  history  of  the  mind. 
The  spiritual  forces  of  the  past,  which  have  prompted 
and  informed  the  culture  of  a  succeeding  age,  live,  in- 
deed, within  that  culture,  but  with  an  absorbed,  under- 
ground life.  The  Hellenic  element  alone  has  not  been 
so  absorbed,  or  content  with  this  underground  life ;  from 
time  to  time  it  has  started  to  the  surface;  culture  has 
been  drawn  back  to  its  sources  to  be  clarified  and  cor- 
rected. Hellenism  is  not  merely  an  absorbed  element  in 
our  intellectual  life;  it  is  a  conscious  tradition  in  it. 

Again,  individual  genius  works  ever  under  conditions 
of  time  and  place :  its  products  are  coloured  by  the  vary- 
ing aspects  of  nature,  and  type  of  human  form,  and  out- 
ward manners  of  life.  There  is  thus  an  element  of 
change  in  art ;  criticism  must  never  for  a  moment  forget 
that  "the  artist  is  the  child  of  his  time.,,  But  besides 
these  conditions  of  time  and  place,  and  independent  of 
them,  there  is  also  an  element  of  permanence,  a  standard 
of  taste,  which  genius  confesses.  This  standard  is  main- 
tained in  a  purely  intellectual  tradition.  It  acts  upon 
the  artist,  not  as  one  of  the  influences  of  his  own  age, 
but  through  those  artistic  products  of  the  previous 
generation  which  first  excited,  while  they  directed  into 


i66 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


a  particular  channel,  his  sense  of  beauty.  The  supreme 
artistic  products  of  succeeding  generations  thus  form  a 
series  of  elevated  points,  taking  each  from  each  the  re- 
flection of  a  strange  light,  the  source  of  which  is  not  in 
the  atmosphere  around  and  above  them,  but  in  a  stage 
of  society  remote  from  ours.  The  standard  of  taste, 
then,  was  fixed  in  Greece,  at  a  definite  historical  period. 
A  tradition  for  all  succeeding  generations,  it  originates 
in  a  spontaneous  growth  out  of  the  influences  of  Greek 
society.  What  were  the  conditions  under  which  this 
ideal,  this  standard  of  artistic  orthodoxy,  was  generated? 
How  was  Greece  enabled  to  force  its  thought  upon 
Europe  ? 

Greek  art,  when  we  first  catch  sight  of  it,  is  entangled 
with  Greek  religion.  We  are  accustomed  to  think  of 
Greek  religion  as  the  religion  of  art  and  beauty,  the 
religion  of  which  the  Olympian  Zeus  and  the  Athena 
Polias  are  the  idols,  the  poems  of  Homer  the  sacred 
books.  Thus  Cardinal  Newman  speaks  of  "the  classical 
polytheism  which  was  gay  and  graceful,  as  was  natural 
in  a  civilised  age."  Yet  such  a  view  is  only  a  partial 
me.  In  it  the  eye  is  fixed  on  the  sharp,  bright  edge  of 
high  Hellenic  culture,  but  loses  sight  of  the  sombre  world 
across  which  it  strikes.  Greek  religion,  where  we  can 
observe  it  most  distinctly,  is  at  once  a  magnificent  ritu- 
alistic system,  and  a  cycle  of  poetical  conceptions.  Re- 
ligions, as  they  grow  by  natural  laws  out  of  man's  life, 
are  modified  by  whatever  modifies  his  life.  They  brighten 
under  a  bright  sky,  they  become  liberal  as  the  social 
range  widens,  they  grow  intense  and  shrill  in  the  clefts 
of  human  life,  where  the  spirit  is  narrow  and  confined, 
and  the  stars  are  visible  at  noonday ;  and  a  fine  analysis 


WINCKELMANN  167 

of  these  differences  is  one  of  the  gravest  functions  of 
religious  criticism.  Still,  the  broad  foundation,  in  mere 
human  nature,  of  all  religions  as  they  exist  for  the  great- 
est number,  is  a  universal  pagan  sentiment,  a  paganism 
which  existed  before  the  Greek  religion,  and  has  lingered 
far  onward  into  the  Christian  world,  ineradicable,  like 
some  persistent  vegetable  growth,  because  its  seed  is  an 
element  of  the  very  soil  out  of  which  it  springs. 

This  pagan  sentiment  measures  the  sadness  with  which 
the  human  mind  is  filled,  whenever  its  thoughts  wander 
far  from  what  is  here,  and  now.  It  is  beset  by  notions 
of  irresistible  natural  powers,  for  the  most  part  ranged 
against  man,  but  the  secret  also  of  his  fortune,  making 
the  earth  golden  and  the  grape  fiery  for  him.  He  makes 
gods  in  his  own  image,  gods  smiling  and  flower-crowned, 
or  bleeding  by  some  sad  fatality,  to  console  him  by  their 
wounds,  never  closed  from  generation  to  generation.  It 
is  with  a  rush  of  home-sickness  that  the  thought  of  death 
presents  itself.  He  would  remain  at  home  for  ever  on 
the  earth  if  he  could.  As  it  loses  its  colour  and  the  senses 
fail,  he  clings  ever  closer  to  it ;  but  since  the  mouldering 
of  bones  and  flesh  must  go  on  to  the  end,  he  is  careful 
for  charms  and  talismans  which  may  chance  to  have 
some  friendly  power  in  them  when  the  inevitable  ship^ 
wreck  comes.  Such  sentiment  is  a  part  of  the  eternal  bask 
of  all  religions,  modified  indeed  by  changes  of  time  and 
place,  but  indestructible,  because  its  root  is  so  deep  isa 
the  earth  of  man's  nature.  The  breath  of  religious  initi- 
ators passes  over  them;  a  few  "rise  up  with  wings  as 
eagles,"  but  the  broad  level  of  religious  life  is  not  per" 
manently  changed.  Religious  progress,  like  all  purely 
spiritual  progress,  is  confined  to  a  few.   This  sentiment 


i68 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


attaches  itself  in  the  earliest  times  to  certain  usages  of 
partriarchal  life,  the  kindling  of  fire,  the  washing  of  the 
body,  the  slaughter  of  the  flock,  the  gathering  of  harvest, 
holidays  and  dances.  Here  are  the  beginnings  of  a 
ritual,  at  first  as  occasional  and  unfixed  as  the  sentiment 
which  it  expresses,  but  destined  to  become  the  permanent 
element  of  religious  life.  The  usages  of  patriarchal  life 
change;  but  this  germ  of  ritual  remains,  promoted  now 
with  a  consciously  religious  motive,  losing  its  domestic 
character,  and  therefore  becoming  more  and  more  in- 
explicable with  each  generation.  Such  pagan  worship, 
in  spite  of  local  variations,  essentially  one,  is  an  element 
in  all  religions.  It  is  the  anodyne  which  the  religious 
principle,  like  one  administering  opiates  to  the  incurable, 
has  added  to  the  law  which  makes  life  sombre  for  the 
vast  majority  of  mankind. 

More  definite  religious  conceptions  come  from  other 
sources,  and  fix  themselves  upon  this  ritual  m  various 
ways,  changing  it,  and  giving  it  new  meanings.  In 
Greece  they  were  derived  from  mythology,  itself  not 
due  to  a  religious  source  at  all,  but  developing  in  the 
course  of  time  into  a  body  of  religious  conceptions,  en- 
tirely human  in  form  and  character.  To  the  unpro- 
gressive  ritual  element  it  brought  these  conceptions,  it- 
self— 17  irrepov  Swages,  the  power  of  the  wing — an  element 
of  refinement,  of  ascension,  with  the  promise  of  an  end- 
less destiny.  While  the  ritual  remains  unchanged,  the  aes- 
thetic element,  only  accidentally  connected  with  it,  ex- 
pands with  the  freedom  and  mobility  of  the  things  of 
the  intellect.  Always,  the  fixed  element  is  the  religious 
observance;  the  fluid,  unfixed  element  is  the  myth,  the 
religious  conception.    This  religion  is  itself  pagan,  and 


WINCKELMANN 


has  in  any  broad  view  of  it  the  pagan  sadness.  It  does 
not  at  once,  and  for  the  majority,  become  the  higher 
Hellenic  religion.  The  country  people,  of  course,  cherish 
the  unlovely  idols  of  an  earlier  time,  such  as  those  which 
Pausanias  found  still  devoutly  preserved  in  Arcadia. 
Athenseus  tells  the  story  of  one  who,  coming  to  a  temple 
of  Latona,  had  expected  to  find  some  worthy  presentment 
of  the  mother  of  Apollo,  and  laughed  on  seeing  only  a 
shapeless  wooden  figure.  The  wilder  people  have  wilder 
gods,  which,  however,  in  Athens,  or  Corinth,  or  Lace- 
daemon,  changing  ever  with  the  worshippers  in  whom 
they  live  and  move  and  have  their  being,  borrow  some- 
thing of  the  lordliness  and  distinction  of  human  nature 
there.  Greek  religion,  too,  has  its  mendicants,  its  puri- 
fications, its  antinomian  mysticism,  its  garments  offered 
to  the  gods,  its  statues  worn  with  kissing,  its  exaggerated 
superstitions  for  the  vulgar  only,  its  worship  of  sorrow, 
its  addolorata,  its  mournful  mysteries.  Scarcely  a  wild 
or  melancholy  note  of  the  medieval  church  but  was  an- 
ticipated by  Greek  polytheism!  What  should  we  have 
thought  of  the  vertiginous  prophetess  at  the  very  centre 
of  Greek  religion?  The  supreme  Hellenic  culture  is  a 
sharp  edge  of  light  across  this  gloom.  The  fiery,  stupe- 
fying wine  becomes  in  a  happier  climate  clear  and  exhil- 
arating. The  Dorian  worship  of  Apollo,  rational,  chas- 
tened, debonair,  with  his  unbroken  daylight,  always  op- 
posed to  the  sad  Chthonian  divinities,  is  the  aspiring  ele- 
ment, by  force  and  spring  of  which  Greek  religion  sub- 
limes itself.  Out  of  Greek  religion,  under  happy  con- 
ditions, arises  Greek  art,  to  minister  to  human  culture.  It 
was  the  privilege  of  Greek  religion  to  be  able  to  trans- 
form itself  into  an  artistic  ideal. 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


For  the  thoughts  of  the  Greeks  about  themselves,  and 
their  relation  to  the  world  generally,  were  ever  in  the 
happiest  readiness  to  be  transformed  into  objects  for 
the  senses.  In  this  lies  the  main  distinction  between 
Greek  art  and  the  mystical  art  of  the  Christian  middle 
age,  which  is  always  struggling  to  express  thoughts  be- 
yond itself.  Take,  for  instance,  a  characteristic  work 
of  the  middle  age,  Angelico's  Coronation  of  the  Virgin 
in  the  cloister  of  Saint  Mark's  at  Florence.  In  some 
strange  halo  of  a  moon  Jesus  and  the  Virgin  Mother  are 
seated,  clad  in  mystical  white  raiment,  half  shroud,  half 
priestly  linen.  Jesus,  with  rosy  nimbus  and  the  long,  pale 
hair — tanquam  lana  alba  et  tanquam  nix — of  the  figure 
in  the  Apocalypse,  with  slender  finger-tips  is  setting  a 
crown  of  pearl  on  the  head  of  Mary,  who,  corpse-like 
in  her  refinement,  is  bending  forward  to  receive  it,  the 
light  lying  like  snow  upon  her  forehead.  Certainly,  it 
cannot  be  said  of  Angelico's  fresco  that  it  throws  into 
a  sensible  form  our  highest  thoughts  about  man  and  his 
relation  to  the  world ;  but  it  did  not  do  this  adequately 
even  for  Angelico.  For  him,  all  that  is  outward  or 
sensible  in  his  work — the  hair  like  wool,  the  rosy  nimbus, 
the  crown  of  pearl — is  only  the  symbol  or  type  of  a 
really  inexpressible  world,  to  which  he  wishes  to  direct 
the  thoughts ;  he  would  have  shrunk  from  the  notion  that 
what  the  eye  apprehended  was  all.  Such  forms  of  art, 
then,  are  inadequate  to  the  matter  they  clothe;  they  re- 
main ever  below  its  level.  Something  of  this  kind  is  true 
also  of  oriental  art.  As  in  the  middle  age  from  an  ex- 
aggerated inwardness,  so  in  the  East  from  a  vagueness, 
a  want  of  definition,  in  thought,  the  matter  presented  to 
art  is  unmanageable,  and  the  forms  of  sense  struggle 


WINCKELMANN 


171 


vainly  with  it.  The  many-headed  gods  of  the  East,  the 
orientalised,  many-breasted  Diana  of  Ephesus,  like  An- 
gelico's  fresco,  are  at  best  overcharged  symbols,  a  means 
of  hinting  at  an  idea  which  art  cannot  fitly  or  completely 
express,  which  still  remains  in  the  world  of  shadows. 

But  take  a  work  of  Greek  art, — the  Venus  of  Melos. 
That  is  in  no  sense  a  symbol,  a  suggestion,  of  anything1 
beyond  its  own  victorious  fairness.  The  mind  begins 
and  ends  with  the  finite  image,  yet  loses  no  part  of  the 
spiritual  motive.  That  motive  is  not  lightly  and  loosely 
attached  to  the  sensuous  form,  as  its  meaning  to  an  alle- 
gory, but  saturates  and  is  identical  with  it.  The  Greek 
mind  had  advanced  to  a  particular  stage  of  self-reflexion, 
but  was  careful  not  to  pass  beyond  it.  In  oriental 
thought  there  is  a  vague  conception  of  life  everywhere, 
but  no  true  appreciation  of  itself  by  the  mind,  no  knowl- 
edge of  the  distinction  of  man's  nature:  in  its  conscious- 
ness of  itself,  humanity  is  still  confused  with  the  fantas- 
tic, indeterminate  life  of  the  animal  and  vegetable  world. 
In  Greek  thought,  on  the  other  hand,  the  "lordship  of  the 
soul"  is  recognised;  that  lordship  gives  authority  and 
divinity  to  human  eyes  and  hands  and  feet;  inanimate 
nature  is  thrown  into  the  background.  But  just  there 
Greek  thought  finds  its  happy  limit;  it  has  not  yet  be- 
come too  inward ;  the  mind  has  not  yet  learned  to  boast 
its  independence  of  the  flesh ;  the  spirit  has  not  yet  ab- 
sorbed everything  with  its  emotions,  nor  reflected  its 
own  colour  everywhere.  It  has  indeed  committed  itself 
to  a  train  of  reflexion  which  must  end  in  defiance  of 
form,  of  all  that  is  outward,  in  an  exaggerated  idealism. 
But  that  end  is  still  distant :  it  has  not  yet  plunged  into 
the  depths  of  religious  mysticism. 


172 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


This  ideal  art,  in  which  the  thought  does  not  outstrip 
or  lie  beyond  the  proper  range  of  its  sensible  embodi- 
ment, could  not  have  arisen  out  of  a  phase  of  life  that 
was  uncomely  or  poor.  That  delicate  pause  in  Greek  re- 
flexion was  joined,  by  some  supreme  good  luck,  to  the 
perfect  animal  nature  of  the  Greeks.  Here  are  the  two 
conditions  of  an  artistic  ideal.  The  influences  which 
perfected  the  animal  nature  of  the  Greeks  are  part  of 
the  process  by  which  "the  ideal"  was  evolved.  Those 
"Mothers"  who,  in  the  second  part  of  Faust,  mould  and 
remould  the  typical  forms  that  appear  in  human  history, 
preside,  at  the  beginning  of  Greek  culture,  over  such  a 
concourse  of  happy  physical  conditions  as  ever  generates 
by  natural  laws  some  rare  type  of  intellectual  or  spiritual 
life.  That  delicate  air,  "nimbly  and  sweetly  recommend- 
ing itself"  to  the  senses,  the  finer  aspects  of  nature,  the 
finer  lime  and  clay  of  the  human  form,  and  modelling 
of  the  dainty  frame-work  of  the  human  countenance: — 
these  are  the  good  luck  of  the  Greek  when  he  enters  upon 
life.  Beauty  becomes  a  distinction,  like  genius,  or  noble 
place. 

"By  no  people,"  says  Winckelmann,  "has  beauty  been 
so  highly  esteemed  as  by  the  Greeks.  The  priests  of  a 
youthful  Jupiter  at  /Egae,  of  the  Ismenian  Apollo,  and 
the  priest  who  at  Tanagra  led  the  procession  of  Mercury, 
bearing  a  lamb  upon  his  shoulders,  were  always  youths 
to  whom  the  prize  of  beauty  had  been  awarded.  The 
citizens  of  Egesta  erected  a  monument  to  a  certain  Philip, 
who  was  not  their  fellow-citizen,  but  of  Croton,  for  his 
distinguished  beauty ;  and  the  people  made  offerings  at  it. 
In  an  ancient  song,  ascribed  to  Simonides  or  Epichar- 
mus,  of  four  wishes,  the  first  was  health,  the  second 


WINCKELMANN 


173 


beauty.  And  as  beauty  was  so  longed  for  and  prized  by 
the  Greeks,  every  beautiful  person  sought  to  become 
known  to  the  whole  people  by  this  distinction,  and  above 
all  to  approve  himself  to  the  artists  because  they  awarded 
the  prize;  and  this  was  for  the  artists  an  occasion  for 
having  supreme  beauty  ever  before  their  eyes.  Beauty 
even  gave  a  right  to  fame ;  and  we  find  in  Greek  histories 
the  most  beautiful  people  distinguished.  Some  were 
famous  for  the  beauty  of  one  single  part  of  their  form; 
as  Demetrius  Phalereus,  for  his  beautiful  eyebrows,  was 
called  Charito-blepharos.  It  seems  even  to  have  been 
thought  that  the  procreation  of  beautiful  children  might 
be  promoted  by  prizes.  This  is  shown  by  the  existence 
of  contests  for  beauty,  which  in  ancient  times  were  es- 
tablished by  Cypselus,  King  of  Arcadia,  by  the  river 
Alpheus;  and,  at  the  feast  of  Apollo  of  Philae,  a  prize 
was  offered  to  the  youths  for  the  deftest  kiss.  This  was 
decided  by  an  umpire;  as  also  at  Megara,  by  the  grave 
of  Diodes.  At  Sparta,  and  at  Lesbos,  in  the  temple  of 
Juno,  and  among  the  Parrhasii,  there  were  contests  for 
beauty  among  women.  The  general  esteem  for  beauty 
went  so  far,  that  the  Spartan  women  set  up  in  their  bed- 
chambers a  Nireus,  a  Narcissus,  or  a  Hyacinth,  that 
they  might  bear  beautiful  children/' 

So,  from  a  few  stray  antiquarianisms,  a  few  faces  cast 
up  sharply  from  the  waves,  Winckelmann,  as  his  manner 
was,  divines  the  temperament  of  the  antique  world,  and 
that  in  which  it  had  delight.  It  has  passed  away  with 
that  distant  age,  and  we  may  venture  to  dwell  upon  it. 
What  sharpness  and  reality  it  has  is  the  sharpness  and 
reality  of  suddenly  arrested  life.  The  Greek  system  of 
gymnastics  originated  as  part  of  a  religious  ritual.  The 


174 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


worshipper  was  to  recommend  himself  to  the  gods  by 
becoming  fleet  and  fair,  white  and  red,  like  them.  The 
beauty  of  the  palaestra,  and  the  beauty  of  the  artist's 
workshop,  reacted  on  one  another.  The  youth  tried  to 
rival  his  gods ;  and  his  increased  beauty  passed  back  into 
them. — "I  take  the  gods  to  witness,  I  had  rather  have  a 
fair  body  than  a  king's  crown" —  OfivvfXL  iravras  deovs 
jlh)  eKecrdaL  av  ttjv  jSacrtXecos  apxyv  a*>ri  rov  /caXds  elvai 
• — that  is  the  form  in  which  one  age  of  the  world  chose 
the  higher  life. — A  perfect  world,  if  the  gods  could  have 
seemed  for  ever  only  fleet  and  fair,  white  and  red !  Let 
us  not  regret  that  this  unperplexed  youth  of  humanity, 
satisfied  with  the  vision  of  itself,  passed,  at  the  due  mo- 
ment, into  a  mournful  maturity;  for  already  the  deep 
joy  was  in  store  for  the  spirit,  of  finding  the  ideal  of 
that  youth  still  red  with  life  in  the  grave. 

It  followed  that  the  Greek  ideal  expressed  itself  pre- 
eminently in  sculpture.  All  art  has  a  sensuous  element, 
colour,  form,  sound — in  poetry  a  dexterous  recalling  of 
these,  together  with  the  profound,  joyful  sensuousness 
of  motion,  and  each  of  them  may  be  a  medium  for  the 
ideal:  it  is  partly  accident  which  in  any  individual  case 
makes  the  born  artist,  poet,  or  painter  rather  than  sculp- 
tor. But  as  the  mind  itself  has  had  an  historical  de- 
velopment, one  form  of  art,  by  the  very  limitations  of 
its  material,  may  be  more  adequate  than  another  for  the 
expression  of  any  one  phase  of  that  development.  Dif- 
ferent attitudes  of  the  imagination  have  a  native  affinity 
with  different  types  of  sensuous  form,  so  that  they  com- 
bine together,  with  completeness  and  ease.  The  arts 
may  thus  be  ranged  in  a  series,  which  corresponds  to  a 
series  of  developments  in  the  human  mind  itself.  Archi- 


WINCKELMANN 


175 


tecture,  which  begins  in  a  practical  need,  can  only  express 
;  by  vague  hint  or  symbol  the  spirit  or  mind  of  the  artist. 
I  He  closes  his  sadness  over  him,  or  wanders  in  the  per- 
plexed intricacies  of  things,  or  projects  his  purpose  from 
him  clean-cut  and  sincere,  or  bares  himself  to  the  sun- 
light. But  these  spiritualities,  felt  rather  than  seen,  can 
but  lurk  about  architectural  form  as  volatile  effects,  to 
be  gathered  from  it  by  reflexion.  Their  expression  is, 
indeed,  not  really  sensuous  at  all.  As  human  form  is 
not  the  subject  with  which  it  deals,  architecture  is  the 
mode  in  which  the  artistic  effort  centres,  when  the 
thoughts  of  man  concerning  himself  are  still  indistinct, 
when  he  is  still  little  preoccupied  with  those  harmonies, 
storms,  victories,  of  the  unseen  and  intellectual  world, 
which,  wrought  out  into  the  bodily  form,  give  it  an 
interest  and  significance  communicable  to  it  alone.  The 
art  of  Egypt,  with  its  supreme  architectural  effects,  is, 
according  to  Hegel's  beautiful  comparison,  a  Memnon 
waiting  for  the  day,  the  day  of  the  Greek  spirit,  the 
humanistic  spirit,  with  its  power  of  speech. 

Again,  painting,  music,  and  poetry,  with  their  endless 
power  of  complexity,  are  the  special  arts  of  the  romantic 
and  modern  ages.  Into  these,  with  the  utmost  attenua- 
tion of  detail,  may  be  translated  every  delicacy  of  thought 
and  feeling,  incidental  to  a  consciousness  brooding  with 
delight  over  itself.  Through  their  gradations  of  shade, 
their  exquisite  intervals,  they  project  in  an  external  form 
that  which  is  most  inward  in  passion  or  sentiment.  Be- 
tween architecture  and  those  romantic  arts  of  painting, 
music,  and  poetry,  comes  sculpture,  which,  unlike  archi- 
tecture, deals  immediately  with  man,  while  it  contrasts 
with  the  romantic  arts  because  it  is  not  self-analytical. 


176  THE  RENAISSANCE 

It  has  to  do  more  exclusively  than  any  other  art  with  j 
the  human  form,  itself  one  entire  medium  of  spiritual  j 
expression,  trembling,  blushing,  melting  into  dew,  with 
inward  excitement.    That  spirituality  which  only  lurks 
about  architecture  as  a  volatile  effect,  in  sculpture  takes 
up  the  whole  given  material,  and  penetrates  it  with  an 
imaginative  motive;  and  at  first  sight  sculpture,  with  its 
solidity  of  form,  seems  a  thing  more  real  and  full  than 
the  faint,  abstract  world  of  poetry  or  painting.   Still  the 
fact  is  the  reverse.    Discourse  and  action  show  man  as  1 
he  is,  more  directly  than  the  play  of  the  muscles  and  the  I 
moulding  of  the  flesh;  and  over  these  poetry  has  com- 
mand.  Painting,  by  the  flushing  of  colour  in  the  face  and 
dilatation  of  light  in  the  eye — music,  by  its  subtle  range 
of  tones — can  refine  most  delicately  upon  a  single  mo- 
ment of  passion,  unravelling  its  subtlest  threads. 

But  why  should  sculpture  thus  limit  itself  to  pure 
form?  Because,  by  this  limitation,  it  becomes  a  perfect 
medium  of  expression  for  one  peculiar  motive  of  the 
imaginative  intellect.  It,  therefore,  renounces  all  those 
attributes  of  its  material  which  do  not  forward  that 
motive.  It  has  had,  indeed,  from  the  beginning  an  un- 
fixed claim  to  colour ;  but  this  element  of  colour  in  it  has 
always  been  more  or  less  conventional,  with  no  melting 
or  modulation  of  tones,  never  permitting  more  than  a 
very  limited  realism.  It  was  maintained  chiefly  as  a 
religious  tradition.  In  proportion  as  the  art  of  sculpture 
ceased  to  be  merely  decorative,  and  subordinate  to  archi- 
tecture, it  threw  itself  upon  pure  form.  It  renounces 
the  power  of  expression  by  lower  or  heightened  tones. 
In  it,  no  member  of  the  human  form  is  more  significant 
than  the  rest;  the  eye  is  wide,  and  without  pupil;  the 


WINCKELMANN  177 

lips  and  brow  are  hardly  less  significant  than  hands, 
and  breasts,  and  feet.  But  the  limitation  of  its  resources 
is  part  of  its  pride:  it  has  no  backgrounds,  no  sky  or 
atmosphere,  to  suggest  and  interpret  a  train  of  feeling; 
a  little  of  suggested  motion,  and  much  of  pure  light  on 
its  gleaming  surfaces,  with  pure  form — only  these.  And 
it  gains  more  than  it  loses  by  this  limitation  to  its  own 
distinguishing  motives;  it  unveils  man  in  the  repose  of 
his  unchanging  characteristics.  That  white  light,  purged 
from  the  angry,  bloodlike  stains  of  action  and  passion, 
reveals,  not  what  is  accidental  in  man,  but  the  tranquil 
godship  in  him,  as  opposed  to  the  restless  accidents  of 
life.  The  art  of  sculpture  records  the  first  naive,  unper- 
plexed  recognition  of  man  by  himself ;  and  it  is  a  proof 
of  the  high  artistic  capacity  of  the  Greeks,  that  they 
apprehended  and  remained  true  to  these  exquisite  limi- 
tations, yet,  in  spite  of  them,  gave  to  their  creations  a 
mobile,  a  vital,  individuality. 

Heiterkeit — blitheness  or  repose,  and  Allgemeinheit— 
generality  or  breadth,  are,  then,  the  supreme  character- 
istics of  the  Hellenic  ideal.  But  that  generality  or 
breadth  has  nothing  in  common  with  the  lax  observation, 
the  unlearned  thought,  the  flaccid  execution,  which  have 
sometimes  claimed  superiority  in  art,  on  the  plea  of  being 
"broad"  or  "general."  Hellenic  breadth  and  generality 
come  of  a  culture  minute,  severe,  constantly  renewed, 
rectifying  and  concentrating  its  impressions  into  certain 
pregnant  types. 

The  basis  of  all  artistic  genius  lies  in  the  power  of 
conceiving  humanity  in  a  new  and  striking  way,  of 
putting  a  happy  world  of  its  own  creation  in  place  of 
the  meaner  world  of  our  common  days,  generating 


i;8 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


around  itself  an  atmosphere  with  a  novel  power  of  re- 
fraction, selecting,  transforming,  recombining  the  im- 
ages it  transmits,  according  to  the  choice  of  the  imagi- 
native intellect.  In  exercising  this  power,  painting  and 
poetry  have  a  variety  of  subject  almost  unlimited.  The 
range  of  characters  or  persons  open  to  them  is  as  various 
as  life  itself ;  no  character,  however  trivial,  misshapen, 
or  unlovely,  can  resist  their  magic.  That  is  because 
those  arts  can  accomplish  their  function  in  the  choice  and 
development  of  some  special  situation,  which  lifts  or 
glorifies  a  character,  in  itself  not  poetical.  To  realise 
this  situation,  to  define,  in  a  chill  and  empty  atmosphere, 
the  focus  where  rays,  in  themselves  pale  and  impotent, 
unite  and  begin  to  burn,  the  artist  may  have,  indeed,  to 
employ  the  most  cunning  detail,  to  complicate  and  re- 
fine upon  thought  and  passion  a  thousandfold.  Let  us 
take  a  brilliant  example  from  the  poems  of  Robert 
Browning.  His  poetry  is  pre-eminently  the  poetry  of 
situations.  The  characters  themselves  are  always  of 
secondary  importance ;  often  they  are  characters  in  them- 
selves of  little  interest;  they  seem  to  come  to  him  by 
strange  accidents  from  the  ends  of  the  world.  His  gift 
is  shown  by  the  way  in  which  he  accepts  such  a  charac- 
ter, throws  it  into  some  situation,  or  apprehends  it  in 
some  delicate  pause  of  life,  in  which  for  a  moment  it 
becomes  ideal.  In  the  poem  entitled  Le  Byron  de  nos 
Jours,  in  his  Dramatis  Personae,  we  have  a  single  mo- 
ment of  passion  thrown  into  relief  after  this  exquisite 
fashion.  Those  two  jaded  Parisians  are  not  intrinsically 
interesting:  they  begin  to  interest  us  only  when  thrown 
into  a  choice  situation.  But  to  discriminate  that  mo- 
ment, to  make  it  appreciable  by  us,  that  we  may  "find" 


WINCKELMANN 


179 


it,  what  a  cobweb  of  allusions,  what  double  and  treble 
reflexions  of  the  mind  upon  itself,  what  an  artificial 
light  is  constructed  and  broken  over  the  chosen  situation ; 
on  how  fine  a  needle's  point  that  little  world  of  passion 
is  balanced !  Yet,  in  spite  of  this  intricacy,  the  poem  has 
the  clear  ring  of  a  central  motive.  We  receive  from  it 
the  impression  of  one  imaginative  tone,  of  a  single  cre- 
ative act. 

To  produce  such  effects  at  all  requires  all  the  resources 
of  painting,  with  its  power  of  indirect  expression,  of 
subordinate  but  significant  detail,  its  atmosphere,  its 
foregrounds  and  backgrounds.  To  produce  them  in  a 
pre-eminent  degree  requires  all  the  resources  of  poetry, 
language  in  its  most  purged  form,  its  remote  associations 
and  suggestions,  its  double  and  treble  lights.  These  ap- 
pliances sculpture  cannot  command.  In  it,  therefore, 
not  the  special  situation,  but  the  type,  the  general  char- 
acter of  the  subject  to  be  delineated,  is  all-important. 
In  poetry  and  painting,  the  situation  predominates  over 
the  character;  in  sculpture,  the  character  over  the  situa- 
tion. Excluded  by  the  proper  limitation  of  its  material 
from  the  development  of  exquisite  situations,  it  has  to 
choose  from  a  select  number  of  types  intrinsically  inter- 
esting— interesting,  that  is,  independently  of  any  special 
situation  into  which  they  may  be  thrown.  Sculpture 
finds  the  secret  of  its  power  in  presenting  these  types, 
in  their  broad,  central,  incisive  lines.  This  it  effects 
not  by  accumulation  of  detail,  but  by  abstracting  from 
it.  All  that  is  accidental,  all  that  distracts  the  simple 
effect  upon  us  of  the  supreme  types  of  humanity,  all 
traces  in  them  of  the  commonness  of  the  world,  it  gradu- 
ally  purges  away. 


180  THE  RENAISSANCE 

Works  of  art  produced  under  this  law,  and  only  these, 
are  really  characterised  by  Hellenic  generality  or  breadth.  || 
In  every  direction  it  is  a  law  of  restraint.  It  keeps  passion 
always  below  that  degree  of  intensity  at  which  it  must  1 
necessarily  be  transitory,  never  winding  up  the  features 
to  one  note  of  anger,  or  desire,  or  surprise.   In  some  of  I 
the  feeble  allegorical  designs  of  the  middle  age,  we  find 
isolated  qualities  potrayed  as  by  so  many  masks ;  its  re- 
ligious art  has  familiarised  us  with  faces  fixed  immov- 
ably into  blank  types  of  placid  reverie.  Men  and  women, 
again,  in  the  hurry  of  life,  often  wear  the  sharp  impress 
of  one  absorbing  motive,  from  which  it  is  said  death 
sets  their  features  free.    All  such  instances  may  be  I 
ranged  under  the  grotesque;  and  the  Hellenic  ideal  has 
nothing  in  common  with  the  grotesque.    It  allows  pas- 
sion to  play  lightly  over  the  surface  of  the  individual 
form,  losing  thereby  nothing  of  its  central  impassivity, 
its  depth  and  repose.   To  all  but  the  highest  culture,  the 
reserved  faces  of  the  gods  will  ever  have  something  of 
insipidity. 

Again,  in  the  best  Greek  sculpture,  the  archaic  im-  j 
mobility  has  been  stirred,  its  forms  are  in  motion;  but 
it  is  a  motion  ever  kept  in  reserve,  and  very  seldom  com- 
mitted to  any  definite  action.    Endless  as  are  the  atti- 
tudes of  Greek  sculpture,  exquisite  as  is  the  invention  j 
of  the  Greeks  in  this  direction,  the  actions  or  situations 
it  permits  are  simple  and  few.   There  is  no  Greek  Ma- 
donna; the  goddesses  are  always  childless.   The  actions 
selected  are  those  which  would  be  without  significance, 
except  in  a  divine  person — binding  on  a  sandal  or  pre-  j 
paring  for  the  bath.    When  a  more  complex  and  signi-  j 
ficant  action  is  permitted,  it  is  most  often  represented 


WINCKELMANN  181 

as  just  finished,  so  that  eager  expectancy  is  excluded,  as 
in  the  image  of  Apollo  just  after  the  slaughter  of  the 
Python,  or  of  Venus  with  the  apple  of  Paris  already  in 
her  hand.  The  Laocoon,  with  all  that  patient  science 
through  which  it  has  triumphed  over  an  almost  unman- 
ageable subject,  marks  a  period  in  which  sculpture  has 
begun  to  aim  at  effects  legitimate,  because  delightful, 
only  in  painting. 

The  hair,  so  rich  a  source  of  expression  in  painting, 
because,  relatively  to  the  eye  or  the  lip,  it  is  mere  drap- 
ery, is  withdrawn  from  attention ;  its  texture,  as  well  as 
its  colour,  is  lost,  its  arrangement  but  faintly  and  severely 
indicated,  with  no  broken  or  enmeshed  light.  The  eyes 
are  wide  and  directionless,  not  fixing  anything  with  their 
gaze,  nor  riveting  the  brain  to  any  special  external  ob- 
ject, the  brows  without  hair.  Again,  Greek  sculpture 
deals  almost  exclusively  with  youth,  where  the  moulding 
of  the  bodily  organs  is  still  as  if  suspended  between 
growth  and  completion,  indicated  but  not  emphasised; 
where  the  transition  from  curve  to  curve  is  so  delicate 
and  elusive,  that  Winckelmann  compares  it  to  a  quiet 
sea,  which,  although  we  understand  it  to  be  in  motion, 
we  nevertheless  regard  as  an  image  of  repose;  where, 
therefore,  the  exact  degree  of  development  is  so  hard  to 
apprehend.  If  a  single  product  only  of  Hellenic  art  were 
to  be  saved  in  the  wreck  of  all  beside,  one  might  choose 
perhaps  from  the  "beautiful  multitude"  of  the  Panathe- 
naic  frieze,  that  line  of  youths  on  horseback,  with  their 
level  glances,  their  proud,  patient  lips,  their  chastened 
reins,  their  whole  bodies  in  exquisite  service.  This 
colourless,  unclassified  purity  of  life,  with  its  blending  and 
interpenetration  of  intellectual,  spiritual,  and  physical 


182 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


elements,  still  folded  together,  pregnant  with  the  possi- 
bilities of  a  whole  world  closed  within  it,  is  the  highest 
expression  of  the  indifference  which  lies  beyond  all  that 
is  relative  or  partial.  Everywhere  there  is  the  effect  of 
an  awaking,  of  a  child's  sleep  just  disturbed.  All  these 
effects  are  united  in  a  single  instance — the  adorante  of 
the  museum  of  Berlin,  a  youth  who  has  gained  the  wrest- 
ler's prize,  with  hands  lifted  and  open,  in  praise  for  the 
victory.  Fresh,  unperplexed,  it  is  the  image  of  a  man 
as  he  springs  first  from  the  sleep  of  nature,  his  white 
light  taking  no  colour  from  any  one-sided  experience. 
He  is  characterless,  so  far  as  character  involves  subjec- 
tion to  the  accidental  influences  of  life. 

'This  sense,"  says  Hegel,  "for  the  consummate  model- 
ling of  divine  and  human  forms  was  pre-eminently  at 
home  in  Greece.  In  its  poets  and  orators,  its  historians 
and  philosophers,  Greece  cannot  be  conceived  from  a 
central  point,  unless  one  brings,  as  a  key  to  the  under- 
standing of  it,  an  insight  into  the  ideal  forms  of  sculp- 
ture, and  regards  the  images  of  statesmen  and  philoso- 
phers, as  well  as  epic  and  dramatic  heroes,  from  the  ar- 
tistic point  of  view.  For  those  who  act,  as  well  as  those 
who  create  and  think,  have,  in  those  beautiful  days  of 
Greece,  this  plastic  character.  They  are  great  and  free, 
and  have  grown  up  on  the  soil  of  their  own  individuality, 
creating  themselves  out  of  themselves,  and  moulding 
themselves  to  what  they  were,  and  willed  to  be.  The 
age  of  Pericles  was  rich  in  such  characters ;  Pericles  him- 
self, Pheidias,  Plato,  above  all  Sophocles,  Thucydides 
also,  Xenophon  and  Socrates,  each  in  his  own  order,  the 
perfection  of  one  remaining  undiminished  by  that  of  the 
others.    They  are  ideal  artists  of  themselves,  cast  each 


WINCKELMANN  183 

in  one  flawless  mould,  works  of  art,  which  stand  before 
[  us  as  an  immortal  presentment  of  the  gods.  Of  this 
II  modelling  also  are  those  bodily  works  of  art,  the  victors 
1  in  the  Olympic  games ;  yes !  and  even  Phryne,  who,  as 
J  the  most  beautiful  of  women,  ascended  naked  out  of 
: !  the  water,  in  the  presence  of  assembled  Greece." 

This  key  to  the  understanding  of  the  Greek  spirit, 
1  Winckelmann  possessed  in  his  own  nature,  itself  like  a 
||  relic  of  classical  antiquity,  laid  open  by  accident  to  our 
alien,  modern  atmosphere.  To  the  criticism  of  that  con- 
summate Greek  modelling  he  brought  not  only  his  culture 
but  his  temperament.  We  have  seen  how  definite  was  the 
leading  motive  of  that  culture;  how,  like  some  central 
root-fibre,  it  maintained  the  well-rounded  unity  of  his 
life  through  a  thousand  distractions.  Interests  not  his, 
nor  meant  for  him,  never  disturbed  him.  In  morals,  as 
in  criticism,  he  followed  the  clue  of  instinct,  of  an  un- 
erring instinct.  Penetrating  into  the  antique  world  by 
his  passion,  his  temperament,  he  enunciated  no  formal 
principles,  always  hard  and  one-sided.  Minute  and 
anxious  as  his  culture  was,  he  never  became  one-sidedly 
self-analytical.  Occupied  ever  with  himself,  perfecting 
himself  and  developing  his  genius,  he  was  not  content, 
as  so  often  happens  with  such  natures,  that  the  atmos- 
phere between  him  and  other  minds  should  be  thick  and 
clouded;  he  was  ever  jealously  refining  his  meaning  into 
[  a  form,  express,  clear,  objective.  This  temperament  he 
nurtured  and  invigorated  by  friendships  which  kept  him 
always  in  direct  contact  with  the  spirit  of  youth.  The 
beauty  of  the  Greek  statues  was  a  sexless  beauty:  the 
statues  of  the  gods  had  the  least  traces  of  sex.  Here 
I  there  is  a  moral  sexlessness,  a  kind  of  ineffectual  whole- 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


ness  of  nature,  yet  with  a  true  beauty  and  significance 
of  its  own. 

One  result  of  this  temperament  is  a  serenity — Heiter- 
keit — which  characterises  Winckelmann's  handling  of  the 
sensuous  side  of  Greek  art.  This  serenity  is,  perhaps,  in 
great  measure,  a  negative  quality:  it  is  the  absence  of 
any- sense  of  want,  or  corruption,  or  shame.  With  the 
sensuous  element  in  Greek  art  he  deals  in  the  pagan 
manner ;  and  what  is  implied  in  that  ?  It  has  been  some- 
times said  that  art  is  a  means  of  escape  from  "the  tyr- 
anny of  the  senses."  It  may  be  so  for  the  spectator: 
he  may  find  that  the  spectacle  of  supreme  works  of  art 
takes  from  the  life  of  the  senses  something  of  its  turbid 
fever.  But  this  is  possible  for  the  spectator  only  be- 
cause the  artist,  in  producing  those  works,  has  gradually 
sunk  his  intellectual  and  spiritual  ideas  in  sensuous  form. 
He  may  live,  as  Keats  lived,  a  pure  life ;  but  his  soul,  like 
that  of  Plato's  false  astronomer,  becomes  more  and  more 
immersed  in  sense,  until  nothing  which  lacks  the  appeal 
to  sense  has  interest  for  him.  How  could  such  an  one 
ever  again  endure  the  greyness  of  the  ideal  or  spiritual 
world?  The  spiritualist  is  satisfied  as  he  watches  the 
escape  of  the  sensuous  elements  from  his  conceptions; 
his  interest  grows,  as  the  dyed  garment  bleaches  in  the 
keener  air.  But  the  artist  steeps  his  thought  again  and 
again  into  the  fire  of  colour.  To  the  Greek  this  immersion 
in  the  sensuous  was,  religiously,  at  least,  indifferent. 
Greek  sensuousness,  therefore,  does  not  fever  the  con- 
science: it  is  shameless  and  childlike.  Christian  asceti- 
cism, on  the  other  hand,  discrediting  the  slightest  touch 
of  sense,  has  from  time  to  time  provoked  into  strong 
emphasis  the  contrast  or  antagonism  to  itself,  of  the 


.  WINCKELMANN  185 

!  artistic  life,  with  its  inevitable  sensuousness. — /  did  but 
I  taste  a  little  honey  with  the  end  of  the  rod  that  was  in 
\mine  hand,  and  lot    I  must  die. — It  has  sometimes 
I  seemed  hard  to  pursue  that  life  without  something  of 
I  conscious  disavowal  of  a  spiritual  world ;  and  this  im- 
parts to  genuine  artistic  interests  a  kind  of  intoxication. 
From  this  intoxication  Winckelmann  is  free:  he  fingers 
those  pagan  marbles  with  unsinged  hands,  with  no  sense 
of  shame  or  loss.   That  is  to  deal  with  the  sensuous  side 
of  art  in  the  pagan  manner. 

The  longer  we  contemplate  that  Hellenic  ideal,  in 
which  man  is  at  unity  with  himself,  with  his  physical 
nature,  with  the  outward  world,  the  more  we  may  be 
inclined  to  regret  that  he  should  ever  have  passed  be- 
yond it,  to  contend  for  a  perfection  that  makes  the  blood 
turbid,  and  frets  the  flesh,  and  discredits  the  actual  world 
about  us.  But  if  he  was  to  be  saved  from  the  ennui 
which  ever  attaches  itself  to  realisation.,  even  the  realisa- 
tion of  the  perfect  life,  it  was  necessary  that  a  conflict 
should  come,  that  some  sharper  note  should  grieve  the 
existing  harmony,  and  the  spirit  chafed  by  it  beat  out 
at  last  only  a  larger  and  profounder  music.  In  Greek 
tragedy  this  conflict  has  begun:  man  finds  himself  face 
to  face  with  rival  claims.  Greek  tragedy  shows  how 
such  a  conflict  may  be  treated  with  serenity,  how  the 
evolution  of  it  may  be  a  spectacle  of  the  dignity,  not'  of 
the  impotence,  of  the  human  spirit.  But  it  is  not  only 
in  tragedy  that  the  Greek  spirit  showed  itself  capable 
of  thus  bringing  joy  out  of  matter  in  itself  full  of  dis- 
couragements. Theocritus,  too,  strikes  often  a  note  of 
romantic  sadness.    But  what  a  blithe  and  steady  poise, 


i86 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


above  these  discouragements,  in  a  clear  and  sunny  strat- 
um of  the  air ! 

Into  this  stage  of  Greek  achievement  Winckelmann 
did  not  enter.  Supreme  as  he  is  where  his  true  inter- 
est lav,  his  insight  into  the  typical  unity  and  repose  of 
the  highest  sort  of  sculpture  seems  to  have  involved 
limitation  in  another  direction.  His  conception  of  art 
excludes  that  bolder  type  of  it  which  deals  confidently 
and  serenely  with  life,  conflict,  evil.  Living  in  a  world 
of  exquisite  but  abstract  and  colourless  form,  he  could 
hardly  have  conceived  of  the  subtle  and  penetrative, 
yet  somewhat  grotesque  art  of  the  modern  world.  What 
would  he  have  thought  of  Gilliatt,  in  Victor  Hugo's 
Travailleurs  de  la  Mery  or  of  the  bleeding  mouth  of 
Fantine  in  the  first  part  of  Les  Miserables,  penetrated  as 
those  books  are  with  a  sense  of  beauty,  as  lively  and 
transparent  as  that  of  a  Greek?  Nay,  a  sort  of  prepara- 
tion for  the  romantic  temper  is  noticeable  even  within 
the  limits  of  the  Greek  ideal  itself,  which  for  his  part 
Winckelmann  failed  to  see.  For  Greek  religion  has  not 
merely  its  mournful  mysteries  of  Adonis,  of  Hyacinthus, 
of  Demeter,  but  it  is  conscious  also  of  the  fall  of  earlier 
divine  dynasties.  Hyperion  gives  way  to  Apollo,  Ocea- 
nus  to  Poseidon.  Around  the  feet  of  that  tranquil 
Olympian  family  still  crowd  the  weary  shadows  of  an 
earlier,  more  formless,  divine  world.  The  placid  minds 
even  of  Olympian  gods  are  troubled  with  thoughts  of  a 
limit  to  duration,  of  inevitable  decay,  of  dispossession. 
Again,  the  supreme  and  colourless  abstraction  of  those 
divine  forms,  which  is  the  secret  of  their  repose,  is  also 
a  premonition  of  the  fleshless,  consumptive  refinements 
of  the  pale,  medieval  artists.    That  high  indifference  to 


WINCKELMANN 


187 


the  outward,  that  impassivity,  has  already  a  touch  of 
the  corpse  in  it :  we  see  already  Angelico  and  the  Master 
of  the  Passion  in  the  artistic  future.  The  suppression 
of  the  sensuous,  the  shutting  of  the  door  upon  it,  the 
ascetic  interest,  may  be  even  now  foreseen.  Those  ab- 
stracted gods,  "ready  to  melt  out  their  essence  fine  into 
the  winds/'  who  can  fold  up  their  flesh  as  a  garment, 
and  still  remain  themselves,  seem  already  to  feel  that 
bleak  air  in  which,  like  Helen  of  Troy,  they  wander  as 
the  spectres  of  the  middle  age. 

Gradually,  as  the  world  came  into  the  church,  an  ar- 
tistic interest,  native  in  the  human  soul,  reasserted  its 
claims.  But  Christian  art  was  still  dependent  on  pagan 
examples,  building  the  shafts  of  pagan  temples  into  its 
churches,  perpetuating  the  form  of  the  basilica,  in  later 
times  working  the  disused  amphitheatres  as  stone  quar- 
ries. The  sensuous  expression  of  ideas  which  unreserv- 
edly discredit  the  world  of  sense,  was  the  delicate  prob- 
lem which  Christian  art  had  before  it.  If  we  think  of 
medieval  painting,  as  it  ranges  from  the  early  German 
schools,  still  with  something  of  the  air  of  the  charnel- 
house  about  them,  to  the  clear  loveliness  of  Perugino,  we 
shall  see  how  that  problem  was  solved.  In  the  very 
"worship  of  sorrow"  the  native  blitheness  of  art  asserted 
itself.  The  religious  spirit,  as  Hegel  says,  "smiled 
through  its  tears."  So  perfectly  did  the  young  Raphael 
infuse  that  Heiterkeit,  that  pagan  blitheness,  into  relig- 
ious works,  that  his  picture  of  Saint  Agatha  at  Bologna 
became  to  Goethe  a  step  in  the  evolution  of  Iphigenie.1 
But  in  proportion  as  the  gift  of  smiling  was  found  once 
1  Italianise  he  Reise.    Bologna,  19  Oct.  1776. 


i88 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


more,  there  came  also  an  aspiration  towards  that  lost 
antique  art,  some  relics  of  which  Christian  art  had  buried 
in  itself,  ready  to  work  wonders  when  their  day  came. 

The  histoy  of  art  has  suffered  as  much  as  any  history 
by  trenchant  and  absolute  divisions.  Pagan  and  Chris- 
tian art  are  sometimes  harshly  opposed,  and  the  Renais- 
sance is  represented  as  a  fashion  which  set  in  at  a  defi- 
nite period.  That  is  the  superficial  view:  the  deeper 
view  is  that  which  preserves  the  identity  of  European 
culture.  The  two  are  really  continuous;  and  there  is  a 
sense  in  which  it  may  be  said  that  the  Renaissance  was 
an  uninterrupted  effort  of  the  middle  age,  that  it  was 
ever  taking  place.  When  the  actual  relics  of  the  an- 
tique were  restored  to  the  world,  in  the  view  of  the 
Christian  ascetic  it  was  as  if  an  ancient  plague-pit  had 
been  opened.  All  the  world  took  the  contagion  of  the 
life  of  nature  and  of  the  senses.  And  now  it  was  seen 
that  the  medieval  spirit,  too,  had  done  something  for  the 
new  fortunes  of  the  antique.  By  hastening  the  decline 
of  art,  by  withdrawing  interest  from  it  and  yet  keeping 
unbroken  the  thread  of  its  traditions,  it  had  suffered  the 
human  mind  to  repose  itself,  that  when  day  came  it 
might  awake,  with  eyes  refreshed,  to  those  ancient, 
ideal  forms. 

The  aim  of  a  right  criticism  is  to  place  Winckelmann 
in  an  intellectual  perspective,  of  which  Goethe  is  the 
foreground.  For,  after  all,  he  is  infinitely  less  than 
Goethe;  and  it  is  chiefly  because  at  certain  points  he 
comes  in  contact  with  Goethe,  that  criticism  entertains 
consideration  of  him.  His  relation  to  modern  culture 
is  a  peculiar  one.  He  is  not  of  the  modern  world;  nor 
is  he  wholly  of  the  eighteenth  century,  although  so  much 


WINCKELMANN  189 

of  his  outer  life  is  characteristic  of  it.  But  that  note  of 
revolt  against  the  eighteenth  century,  which  we  detect 
in  Goethe,  was  struck  by  Winckelmann.  Goethe  illus- 
trates a  union  of  the  Romantic  spirit,  in  its  adventure, 
its  variety,  its  profound  subjectivity  of  soul,  with  Hel- 
lenism, in  its  transparency,  its  rationality,  its  desire  of 
beauty— that  marriage  of  Faust  and  Helena,  of  which 
the  art  of  the  nineteenth  century  is  the  child,  the  beau- 
tiful lad  Euphorion,  as  Goethe  conceives  him,  on  the 
crags,  in  the  "splendour  of  battle  and  in  harness  as  for 
victory,"  his  brows  bound  with  light.1  Goethe  illustrates, 
too,  the  preponderance  in  this  marriage  of  the  Hellenic 
element ;  and  that  element,  in  its  true  essence,  was  made 
known  to  him  by  Winckelmann. 

Breadth,  centrality,  with  blitheness  and  repose,  are 
the  marks  of  Hellenic  culture.  Is  such  culture  a  lost 
art?  The  local,  accidental  colouring  of  its  own  age  has 
passed  from  it;  and  the  greatness  that  is  dead  looks 
greater  when  every  link  with  what  is  slight  and  vulgar 
has  been  severed.  We  can  only  see  it  at  all  in  the  re- 
flected, refined  light  which  a  great  education  creates  for 
us.  Can  we  bring  down  that  ideal  into  the  gaudy,  per- 
plexed light  of  modern  life? 

Certainly,  for  us  of  the  modern  world,  with  its  con- 
flicting claims,  its  entangled  interests,  distracted  by  so 
many  sorrows,  with  many  preoccupations,  so  bewildering 
an  experience,  the  problem  of  unity  with  ourselves,  in 
blitheness  and  repose,  is  far  harder  than  it  was  for  the 
Greek  within  the  simple  terms  of  antique  life.  Yet,  not 
less  than  ever,  the  intellect  demands  completeness,  cen- 
trality. It  is  this  which  Winckelmann  imprii?ts  on  the 
1  Faust,  Th.  it.  Act.  3. 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


imagination  of  Goethe,  at  the  beginning  of  life,  in  its 
original  and  simplest  form,  as  in  a  fragment  of  Greek 
art  itself,  stranded  on  that  littered,  indeterminate  shore 
of  Germany  in  the  eighteenth  centry.  In  Winckelmann, 
this  type  comes  to  him,  not  as  in  a  book  or  a  theory,  but 
more  importunately,  because  in  a  passionate  life,  in  a 
personality.  For  Goethe,  possessing  all  modern  inter- 
ests ready  to  be  lost  in  the  perplexed  currents  of  modern 
thought,  he  defines,  in  clearest  outline,  the  eternal  prob- 
lem of  culture — balance,  unity  with  one's  self,  consum- 
mate Greek  modelling. 

It  could  no  longer  be  solved,  as  in  Phyrne  ascending 
naked  out  of  the  water,  by  perfection  of  bodily  form, 
or  any  joyful  union  with  the  external  world :  the  shadows 
had  grown  too  long,  the  light  too  solemn,  for  that.  It 
could  hardly  be  solved,  as  in  Pericles  or  Pheidias,  by 
the  direct  exercise  of  any  single  talent:  amid  the  mani- 
fold claims  of  our  modern  intellectual  life,  that  could 
only  have  ended  in  a  thin,  one-sided  growth.  Goethe's 
Hellenism  was  of  another  order,  the  Allgemeinheit  and 
Heiterkeit,  the  completeness  and  serenity,  of  a  watchful, 
exigent  intellectualism.  Im  Ganzen,  Guten,  Wahren, 
resolut  zu  leben: — is  Goethe's  description  of  his  own 
higher  life ;  and  what  is  meant  by  life  in  the  whole — im 
Ganzen?  It  means  the  life  of  one  for  whom,  over  and 
over  again,  what  was  once  precious  has  become  indiffer- 
ent. Every  one  who  aims  at  the  life  of  culture  is  met 
hy  many  forms  of  it,  arising  out  of  the  intense,  laborious, 
one-sided  development  of  some  special  talent.  They  are 
the  brightest  enthusiasms  the  world  has  to  show:  and 
it  is  iiOt1  their  part  to  weigh  the  claims  which  this  or  that 
alien  fcan  of  genius  makes  upon  them.    But  the  proper 


WINCKELMANN 


instinct  of  self-culture  cares  not  so  much  to  reap  all 
that  those  various  forms  of  genius  can  give,  as  to  find 
in  them  its  own  strength.  The  demand  of  the  intellect 
is  to  feel  itself  alive.  It  must  see  into  the  laws,  the  op- 
eration, the  intellectual  reward  of  every  divided  form  of 
culture;  but  only  that  it  may  measure  the  relation  be- 
tween itself  and  them.  It  struggles  with  those  forms 
till  its  secret  is  won  from  each,  and  then  lets  each  fall 
back  into  its  place,  in  the  supreme,  artistic  view  of  life. 
With  a  kind  of  passionate  coldness,  such  natures  rejoice 
to  be  away  from  and  past  their  former  selves,  and  above 
all,  they  are  jealous  of  that  abandonment  to  one  special 
gift  which  really  limits  their  capabilities.  It  would  have 
been  easy  for  Goethe,  with  the  gift  of  a  sensuous  nature, 
to  let  it  overgrow  him.  It  comes  easily  and  naturally, 
perhaps,  to  certain  "other  worldly"  natures  to  be  even 
as  the  Schdne  Seele,  that  ideal  of  gentle  pietism,  in  Wil- 
helm  Meister:  but  to  the  large  vision  of  Goethe,  this 
seemed  to  be  a  phase  of  life  that  a  man  might  feel  all 
round,  and  leave  behind  him.  Again,  it  is  easy  to  in- 
dulge the  commonplace  metaphysical  instinct.  But  a 
taste  for  metaphysics  may  be  one  of  those  things  which 
we  must  renounce,  if  we  mean  to  mould  our  lives  to  ar- 
tistic perfection.  Philosophy  serves  culture,  not  by  the 
fancied  gift  of  absolute  or  transcendental  knowledge,  but 
by  suggesting  questions  which  help  one  to  detect  the  pas- 
sion, and  strangeness,  and  dramatic  contrasts  of  life. 

But  Goethe's  culture  did  not  remain  "behind  the  veil" : 
it  ever  emerged  in  the  practical  functions  of  art,  in  actual 
production.  For  him  the  problem  came  to  be : — Can  the 
blitheness  and  universality  of  the  antique  ideal  be  com- 
municated to  artistic  productions,  which  shall  contain  the 


192 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


fulness  of  the  experience  of  the  modern  world?  We 
have  seen  that  the  development  of  the  various  forms  of 
art  has  corresponded  to  the  development  of  the  thoughts 
of  man  concerning  humanity,  to  the  growing  revelation 
of  the  mind  to  itself.  Sculpture  corresponds  to  the  un- 
perplexed,  emphatic  outlines  of  Hellenic  humanism; 
painting  to  the  mystic  depth  and  intricacy  of  the  middle 
age ;  music  and  poetry  have  their  fortune  in  the  modern 
world. 

Let  us  understand  by  poetry  all  literary  production 
which  attains  the  power  of  giving  pleasure  by  its  form, 
as  distinct  from  its  matter.  Only  in  this  varied  literary 
form  can  art  command  that  width,  variety,  delicacy  of 
resources,  which  will  enable  it  to  deal  with  the  conditions 
of  modern  life.  What  modern  art  has  to  do  in  the  ser- 
vice of  culture  is  so  to  rearrange  the  details  of  modern 
life,  so  to  reflect  it,  that  it  may  satisfy  the  spirit.  And 
what  does  the  spirit  need  in  the  face  of  modern  life? 
The  sense  of  freedom.  That  naive,  rough  sense  of  free- 
dom, which  supposes  man's  will  to  be  limited,  if  at  all, 
only  by  a  will  stronger  than  his,  he  can  never  have  again. 
The  attempt  to  represent  it  in  art  would  have  so  little 
verisimilitude  that  it  would  be  flat  and  uninteresting. 
The  chief  factor  in  the  thoughts  of  the  modern  mind 
concerning  itself  is  the  intricacy,  the  universality  of 
natural  law,  even  in  the  moral  order.  For  us,  necessity  is 
not,  as  of  old,  a  sort  of  mythological  personage  without 
us,  with  whom  we  can  do  warfare.  It  is  rather  a  magic 
web  woven  through  and  through  us,  like  that  magnetic 
system  of  which  modern  science  speaks,  penetrating  us 
with  a  network,  subtler  than  our  subtlest  nerves,  yet  bear- 
ing in  it  the  central  forces  of  the  world.  Can  art  represent 


WINCKELMANN 


193 


men  and  women  in  these  bewildering  toils  so  as  to  give 
the  spirit  at  least  an  equivalent  for  the  sense  of  free- 
dom? Certainly,  in  Goethe's  romances,  and  even  more  in 
the  romances  of  Victor  Hugo,  we  have  high  examples 
of  modern  art  dealing  thus  with  modern  life,  regarding 
that  life  as  the  modern  mind  must  regard  it,  yet  reflect- 
ing upon  it  blitheness  and  repose.  Natural  laws  we  shall 
never  modify,  embarrass  us  as  they  may ;  but  there  is  still 
something  in  the  nobler  or  less  noble  attitude  with  which 
we  watch  their  fatal  combinations.  In  those  romances 
of  Goethe  and  Victor  Hugo,  in  some  excellent  work  done 
after  them,  this  entanglement,  this  network  of  law,  be- 
comes the  tragic  situation,  in  which  certain  groups  of 
noble  men  and  women  work  out  for  themselves  a  su- 
preme Denouement.  Who,  if  he  saw  through  all,  would 
fret  against  the  chain  of  circumstance  which  endows  one 
at  the  end  with  those  great  experiences  ? 


CONCLUSION  1 


Aeyei  irov  "Hpd/cXetros  on  wclvtcl  x°^PeL  Ka^  ovdev  fxevet 
To  regard  all  things  and  principles  of  things  as  incon- 
stant modes  or  fashions  has  more  and  more  become  the 
tendency  of  modern  thought.  Let  us  begin  with  that 
which  is  without — our  physical  life.  Fix  upon  it  in  one 
of  its  more  exquisite  intervals,  the  moment,  for  instance, 
of  delicious  recoil  from  the  flood  of  water  in  summer 
heat.  What  is  the  whole  physical  life  in  that  moment 
but  a  combination  of  natural  elements  to  which  science 
gives  their  names  ?  But  those  elements,  phosphorus  and 
lime  and  delicate  fibres,  are  present  not  in  the  human 
body  alone:  we  detect  them  in  places  most  remote  from 
it.  Our  physical  life  is  a  perpetual  motion  of  them — 
the  passage  of  the  blood,  the  waste  and  repairing  of  the 
lenses  of  the  eye,  the  modification  of  the  tissues  of  the 
brain  under  every  ray  of  light  and  sound — processes 
which  science  reduces  to  simpler  and  more  elementary 
forces.  Like  the  elements  of  which  we  are  composed, 
the  action  of  these  forces  extends  beyond  us :  it  rusts  iron 
and  ripens  corn.   Far  out  on  every  side  of  us  those  ele- 

1This  brief  "Conclusion"  was  omitted  in  the  second  edi- 
tion of  this  book,  as  I  conceived  it  might  possibly  mislead 
some  of  those  young  men  into  whose  hands  it  might  fall. 
On  the  whole,  I  have  thought  it  best  to  reprint  it  here, 
with  some  slight  changes  which  bring  it  closer  to  my 
original  meaning.  I  have  dealt  more  fully  in  Metritis  the 
Epicurean  with  the  thoughts  suggested  by  it. 

194 


CONCLUSION 


195 


ments  are  broadcast,  driven  in  many  currents ;  and  birth 
and  gesture  and  death  and  the  springing  of  violets  from 
the  grave  are  but  a  few  out  of  ten  thousand  resultant 
combinations.  That  clear,  perpetual  outline  of  face  and 
limb  is  but  an  image  of  ours,  under  which  we  group 
them — a  design  in  a  web,  the  actual  threads  of  which 
pass  out  beyond  it.  This  at  least  of  flame-like  our  life 
has,  that  it  is  but  the  concurrence,  renewed  from  moment 
to  moment,  of  forces  parting  sooner  or  later  on  their 
ways. 

Or,  if  we  begin  with  the  inward  world  of  thought  and 
feeling,  the  whirlpool  is  still  more  rapid,  the  flame  more 
eager  and  devouring.  There  it  is  no  longer  the  gradual 
darkening  of  the  eye,  the  gradual  fading  of  colour  from 
the  wall — movements  of  the  shore-side,  where  the  water 
flows  down  indeed,  though  in  apparent  rest — but  the  race 
of  the  mid-stream,  a  drift  of  momentary  acts  of  sight 
and  passion  and  thought.  At  first  sight  experience  seems 
to  bury  us  under  a  flood  of  external  objects,  pressing 
upon  us  with  a  sharp  and  importunate  reality,  calling  us 
out  of  ourselves  in  a  thousand  forms  of  action.  But 
when  reflexion  begins  to  play  upon  those  objects  they 
are  dissipated  under  its  influence;  the  cohesive  force 
seems  suspended  like  some  trick  of  magic;  each  object 
is  loosed  into  a  group  of  impressions — colour,  odour,  tex- 
ture— in  the  mind  of  the  observer.  And  if  we  continue 
to  dwell  in  thought  on  this  world,  not  of  objects  in  the 
solidity  with  which  language  invests  them,  but  of  im- 
pressions, unstable,  flickering,  inconsistent,  which  burn 
and  are  extinguished  with  our  consciousness  of  them,  it 
contracts  still  further:  the  whole  scope  of  observation 
is  dwarfed  into  the  narrow  chamber  of  the  individual 


196  THE  RENAISSANCE 

mind.  Experience,  already  reduced  to  a  group  of  im- 
pressions, is  ringed  round  for  each  one  of  us  by  that 
thick  wall  of  personality  through  which  no  real  voice  has 
ever  pierced  on  its  way  to  us,  or  from  us  to  that  which 
we  can  only  conjecture  to  be  without.  Every  one  of  those 
impressions  is  the  impression  of  the  individual  in  his 
isolation,  each  mind  keeping  as  a  solitary  prisoner  its 
own  dream  of  a  world.  Analysis  goes  a  step  farther  still, 
and  assures  us  that  those  impressions  of  the  individual 
mind  to  which,  for  each  one  of  us,  experience  dwindles 
down,  are  in  perpetual  flight ;  that  each  of  them  is  limited 
by  time,  and  that  as  time  is  infinitely  divisible,  each  of 
them  is  infinitely  divisible  also ;  all  that  is  actual  in  it 
being  a  single  moment,  gone  while  we  try  to  apprehend 
it,  of  which  it  may  ever  be  more  truly  said  that  it  has 
ceased  to  be  than  that  it  is.  To  such  a  tremulous  wisp 
constantly  re-forming  itself  on  the  stream,  to  a  single 
sharp  impression,  with  a  sense  in  it,  a  relic  more  or  less 
fleeting,  of  such  moments  gone  by,  what  is  real  in  our 
life  fines  itself  down.  It  is  with  this  movement,  with 
the  passage  and  dissolution  of  impressions,  images,  sen- 
sations, that  analysis  leaves  off — that  continual  vanishing 
away,  that  strange,  perpetual  weaving  and  unweaving  of 
ourselves. 

Philosophiren,  says  Novalis,  ist  dephlegmatisiren,  vivi- 
ficiren.  The  service  of  philosophy,  of  speculative  cul- 
ture, towards  the  human  spirit,  is  to  rouse,  to  startle  it 
to  a  life  of  constant  and  eager  observation.  Every  mo- 
ment some  form  grows  perfect  in  hand  or  face;  some 
tone  on  the  hills  or  the  sea  is  choicer  than  the  rest ;  some 
mood  of  passion  or  insight  or  intellectual  excitement  is 
irresistibly  real  and  attractive  to  us, — for  that  moment 


CONCLUSION 


197 


only.  Not  the  fruit  of  experience,  but  experience  itself, 
is  the  end.  A  counted  number  of  pulses  only  is  given  to 
us  of  a  variegated,  dramatic  life.  How  may  we  see  in 
them  all  that  is  to  be  seen  in  them  by  the  finest  senses? 
How  shall  we  pass  most  swiftly  from  point  to  point,  and 
be  present  always  at  the  focus  where  the  greatest  num- 
ber of  vital  forces  unite  in  their  purest  energy? 

To  burn  always  with  this  hard,  gemlike  flame,  to  main- 
tain this  ecstasy,  is  success  in  life.  In  a  sense  it  might 
even  be  said  that  our  failure  is  to  form  habits :  for,  after 
all,  habit  is  relative  to  a  stereotyped  world,  and  meantime 
it  is  only  the  roughness  of  the  eye  that  makes  any  two 
persons,  things,  situations,  seem  alike.  While  all  melts 
under  our  feet,  we  may  well  grasp  at  any  exquisite  pas- 
sion, or  any  contribution  to  knowledge  that  seems  by  a 
lifted  horizon  to  set  the  spirit  free  for  a  moment,  or  any 
stirring  of  the  senses,  strange  dyes,  strange  colours,  and 
curious  odours,  or  work  of  the  artist's  hands,  or  the  face 
of  one's  friend.  Not  to  discriminate  every  moment  some 
passionate  attitude  in  those  about  us,  and  in  the  very 
brilliancy  of  their  gifts  some  tragic  dividing  of  forces 
on  their  ways,  is,  on  this  short  day  of  frost  and  sun,  to 
sleep  before  evening.  With  this  sense  of  the  splendour 
of  our  experience  and  of  its  awful  brevity,  gathering  all 
we  are  into  one  desperate  effort  to  see  and  touch,  we  shall 
hardly  have  time  to  make  theories  about  the  things  we 
see  and  touch.  What  we  have  to  do  is  to  be  for  ever 
curiously  testing  new  opinions  and  courting  new  im- 
pressions, never  acquiescing  in  a  facile  orthodoxy  of 
Comte,  or  of  Hegel,  or  of  our  own.  Philosophical  theo- 
ries or  ideas,  as  points  of  view,  instruments  of  criticism, 
may  help  us  to  gather  up  what  might  otherwise  pass  un- 


THE  RENAISSANCE 


regarded  by  us.  "Philosophy  is  the  microscope  of 
thought."  The  theory  or  idea  or  system  which  requires 
of  us  the  sacrifice  of  any  part  of  this  experience,  in  con- 
sideration of  some  interest  into  which  we  cannot  enter, 
or  some  abstract  theory  we  have  not  identified  with 
ourselves,  or  of  what  is  only  conventional,  has  no  real 
claim  upon  us. 

One  of  the  most  beautiful  passages  of  Rousseau  is 
that  in  the  sixth  book  of  the  Confessions,  where  he  de- 
scribes the  awakening  in  him  of  the  literary  sense.  An 
undefinable  taint  of  death  had  clung  always  about  him, 
and  now  in  early  manhood  he  believed  himself  smitten 
by  mortal  disease.  He  asked  himself  how  he  might  make 
as  much  as  possible  of  the  interval  that  remained;  and 
he  was  not  biassed  by  anything  in  his  previous  life  when 
he  decided  that  it  must  be  by  intellectual  excitement, 
which  he  found  just  then  in  the  clear,  fresh  writings  of 
Voltaire.  Well!  we  are  all  condamnes  as  Victor  Hugo 
says :  we  are  all  under  sentence  of  death  but  with  a  sort 
of  indefinite  reprieve — les  hommes  sont  tons  condamnes 
a  mort  avec  des  sursis  indeiinis:  we  have  an  interval, 
and  then  our  place  knows  us  no  more.  Some  spend  this 
interval  in  listlessness,  some  in  high  passions,  the  wisest, 
at  least  among  "the  children  of  this  world,"  in  art  and 
song.  For  our  one  chance  lies  in  expanding  that  inter- 
val, in  getting  as  many  pulsations  as  possible  into  the 
given  time.  Great  passions  may  give  us  this  quickened 
sense  of  life,  ecstasy  and  sorrow  of  love,  the  various 
forms  of  enthusiastic  activity,  disinterested  or  otherwise, 
which  come  naturally  to  many  of  us.  Only  be  sure  it  is 
passion — that  it  does  yield  you  this  fruit  of  a  quickened, 
multiplied  consciousness.    Of  such  wisdom,  the  poetic 


CONCLUSION 


199 


passion,  the  desire  of  beauty,  the  love  of  art  for  its  own 
sake,  has  most.  For  art  comes  to  you  proposing  frankly 
to  give  nothing  but  the  highest  quality  to  your  moments 
as  they  pass,  and  simply  for  those  moments'  sake. 

1868. 


THE  END 


V 


Modern  Library  of  the  World's  Best  Books 
COMPLETE  LIST  OF  TITLES  IN 

THE  MODERN  LIBRARY 

For  convenience  in  ordering 
please  use  number  at  right  of  title 


ADAMS,  HENRY 
AIKEN,  CONRAD 

AIKEN,  CONRAD 
ANDERSON,  SHERWOOD 
ANDERSON,  SHERWOOD 
ANDREYEV,  LEONID 

APULEIUS,  LUCIUS 
ARTZI B ASHEV,  MICHAEL 

BALZAC 
BALZAC 
BAUDELAIRE 
BEEBE,  WILLIAM 
BEERBOHM,  MAX 
BENNETT,  ARNOLD 
BIERCE,  AMBROSE 
BLAKE,  WILLIAM 
BOCCACCIO 
BRONTE,  CHARLOTTE 
BRONTE,  EMILY 
BURTON,  RICHARD 
BUTLER,  SAMUEL 
BUTLER,  SAMUEL 

CABELL,  JAMES  BRANCH 
CABELL,  JAMES  BRANCH 
CARPENTER,  EDWARD 
CARROLL,  LEWIS 
CASANOVA,  JACQUES 
GATHER,  WILLA 
CELLINI,  BENVENUTO 
CERVANTES 
CHAUCER 

CHESTERTON,  G.  K. 


The  Education  of  Henry  Adams  76 
A  Comprehensive  Anthology  of 

American  Verse  101 
Modern  American  Poetry  127 
Poor  White  115 
Winesburg,  Ohio  104 
The  Seven  That  Were  Hanged,  and 

the  Red  Laugh  45 
The  Golden  Ass  88 
Sanine  189 

Droll  Stories  193 
Short  Stories  40 
Prose  and  Poetry  70 
Jungle  Peace  30 
Zuleika  Dobson  116 
The  Old  Wives'  Tale  184 
In  the  Midst  of  Life  133 
Poems  91 

The  Decameron  71 

Jane  Eyre  64 

Wuthering  Heights  106 

The  Arabian  Nights  201 

Erewhon  and  Erewhon  Revisited  136 

The  Way  of  All  Flesh  13 

Beyond  Life  25 

The  Cream  of  the  Jest  126 

Love's  Coming  of  Age  51 

Alice  in  Wonderland,  etc.  79 

Memoirs  of  Casanova  165 

Death  Comes  for  the  Archbishop  191 

Autobiography  of  Cellini  3 

Don  Quixote  174 

The  Canterbury  Tales  161 

Man  Who  Was  Thursday  35 


CONRAD,  JOSEPH 

CONRAD,  JOSEPH 
CONRAD,  JOSEPH 
CORNEILLE  and  RACINE 
CORVO,  FREDERICK  BARON 
CRANE,  STEPHEN 

D'ANNUNZIO,  GABRIELE 
DANTE 

DAUDET,  ALPHONSE 
DEFOE,  DANIEL 
DEWEY,  JOHN 
DICKENS,  CHARLES 
DOS  PASSOS,  JOHN 
DOSTOYEVSKY,  FYODOR 
DOSTOYEVSKY,  FYODOR 
DOSTOYEVSKY,  FYODOR 
DOUGLAS,  NORMAN 
DOUGLAS,  NORMAN 
DOWSON,  ERNEST 
DREISER,  THEODORE 
DREISER,  THEODORE 
DUMAS,  ALEXANDRE 
DUMAS,  ALEXANDRE 
DU  MAURI ER,  GEORGE 

EDMAN,  IRWIN 
ELLIS,  HAVELOCK 

FAULKNER,  WILLIAM 
FEUCHTWANGER,  LION 
FIELDING,  HENRY 
FLAUBERT,  GUSTAVE 
FLAUBERT,  GUSTAVE 
FLAUBERT,  GUSTAVE 
FRANCE,  ANATOLE 
FRANCE,  ANATOLE 
FRANCE,  ANATOLE 
FRANCE,  ANATOLE 
FRANCE,  ANATOLE 
FRANCE,  ANATOLE 
FRANKLIN,  BENJAMIN 

GALSWORTHY,  JOHN 

GAUTIER,  THEOPHILE 
GEORGE,  W.  L. 
GIDE,  ANDRE 
GILBERT,  W.  S. 
GILBERT,  W.  S. 
GISSING,  GEORGE 


Heart  of  Darkness 

(In  Great  Modern  Short  Stones  168) 
Lord  Jim  1 86 
Victory  34 

Six  Plays  of  Corneille  and  Racine  194 
A  History  of  the  Borgias  192 
Maggie,  and  Other  Stories  102 

Flame  of  Life  65 

The  Divine  Comedy  208 

Sapho  85 

Moll  Flanders  122 

Human  Nature  and  Conduct  173 

Pickwick  Papers  204 

Three  Soldiers  205 

Crime  and  Punishment  199 

The  Brothers  Karamazov  151 

Poor  People  10 

Old  Calabria  141 

South  Wind  5 

Poems  and  Prose  74 

Sister  Carrie  8 

Twelve  Men  I48 

Camille  69 

The  Three  Musketeers  143 
Peter  Ibbetson  207 

The  Philosophy  of  Plato  181 
The  Dance  of  Life  160 

Sanctuary  61 
Power  206 
Tom  Jones  185 
Madame  Bovary  28 
Salammbo  118 

Temptation  of  St.  Anthony  92 

Crime  of  Sylvestre  Bonnard  22 

Penguin  Island  210 

The  Queen  Pedauque  no 

The  Red  Lily  7 

The  Revolt  of  the  Angels  11 

Thais  67 

Autobiography,  etc.  39 

The  Apple  Tree 

(In  Great  Modern  Short  Stories  168) 
Mile.  De  Maupin  53 
A  Bed  of  Roses  75 
The  Counterfeiters  187 
The  Mikado,  Iolanthe,  etc.  26 
Pinafore  and  Other  Plays  113 
New  Grub  Street  125 


GISSING,  GEORGE 
GOETHE 

GOETHE 

GORKY,  MAXIM 


HARDY,  THOMAS 
HARDY,  THOMAS 
HARDY,  THOMAS 
HARDY,  THOMAS 
HAWTHORNE,  NATHANIEL 
HEARN,  LAFCADIO 
HECHT,  BEN 
HEMINGWAY,  ERNEST 
HEMINGWAY,  ERNEST 
HOMER 
HOMER 

HUDSON,  W.  H. 
HUDSON,  W.  H. 
HUGHES,  RICHARD 
HUNEKER,  TAMES  G. 
HUXLEY,  ALDOUS 
HUXLEY,  ALDOUS 
HUYSMANS,  J.  K. 

IBSEN,  HENRIK 
IBSEN,  HENRIK 

IBSEN  HENRIK 


JAMES,  HENRY 
JAMES,  HENRY 
JAMES,  WILLIAM 
JOYCE,  JAMES 
JOYCE,  JAMES 


KENT,  ROCKWELL 
KOMROFF,  MANUEL 
KUPRIN,  ALEXANDRE 

LAWRENCE,  D.  H. 
LAWRENCE,  D.  H. 
LEWIS,  SINCLAIR 
LEWISOHN,  LUDWIG 
LONGFELLOW,  HENRY  W. 
LOUYS,  PIERRE 
LUDWIG,  EMIL 


Private  Papers  of  Henry  Ryecroft  46 
Faust  177 

The  Sorrows  of  Werther 

(In  Collected  German  Stories  108) 
Creatures  That  Once  Were  Men  and 

Other  Stones  48 

Jude  the  Obscure  135 

The  Mayor  of  Casterbridge  17 

The  Return  of  the  Native  121 

Tess  of  the  D'Urbervilles  72 

The  Scarlet  Letter  93 

Some  Chinese  Ghosts  130 

Erik  Dorn  29 

A  Farewell  To  Arms  91 

The  Sun  Also  Rises  170 

The  Iliad  166 

The  Odyssey  167 

Green  Mansions  89 

The  Purple  Land  24 

A  High  Wind  in  Jamaica  112 

Painted  Veils  43 

Antic  Hay  209 

Point  Counter  Point  180 

Against  the  Grain  183 

A  Doll's  House,  Ghosts,  etc.  6 

Hedda  Gabler,  Pillars  of  Society,  The 

Master  Builder  36 
The  Wild  Duck,  Rosmersholm,  The 

League  of  Youth,  Peer  Gynt  54 

Daisy  Miller,  etc.  63 

The  Turn  of  the  Screw  169 

The  Philosophy  of  William  James  114 

Dubliners  124 

A  Portrait  of  the  Artist  as  a  Young 
Man  145 

Wilderness  182 
Oriental  Romances  55 
Yam  a  203 

The  Rainbow  128 
Sons  and  Lovers  109 
Arrowsmith  42 
Up  Stream  123 
Poems  $6 
Aphrodite  77 
Napoleon  95 


WHISTLER,  J.  McNEIL 
WHITMAN,  WALT 
WILDE,  OSCAR 
WILDE,  OSCAR 
WILDE,  OSCAR 
WILDE,  OSCAR 
WILDER,  THORNTON 
WOOLF,  VIRGINIA 

YEATS,  W.  B. 
YOUNG,  G.  F. 

ZOLA,  EMILE 
ZWEIG,  STEFAN 


Life  and  Art,  with  32  Reproductions  150 
Leaves  of  Grass  97 
De  Profundis  117 
Dorian  Gray  1 

The  Plays  of  Oscar  Wilde  83 
Poems  and  Fairy  Tales  84 
The  Cabala  155 
Mrs.  Dalloway  96 

Irish  Fairy  and  Folk  Tales  44 
The  Medici  179 

Nana  142 
Amok 

(In  Collected  German  Stories  108) 


MODERN  LIBRARY  GIANTS 

Every  Modern  Library  Giant  is  complete  and  unabridged 
and  over  1200  pages  long, 

Gi.    TOLSTOY,  LEO.  War  and  Peace. 

G2.    BOSWELL,  JAMES.  Life  of  Samuel  Johnson. 

G3.    HUGO,  VICTOR.  Les  Miserables. 

G4.    THE  COMPLETE  POETICAL  WORKS 

OF  KEATS  AND  SHELLEY. 
G5.    PLUTARCH'S  LIVES. 

G6.\  GIBBON,  EDWARD.  The  Decline  and  Fall  of 
G7. /  the  Roman  Empire  (Complete  in  Two  Volumes). 
G8.  THE  COMPLETE  NOVELS  OF  JANE  AUSTEN. 
G9.  G.  F.  YOUNG.  The  Medici  (With  32  full-page  illus- 
trations). 

Gio.  TWELVE  FAMOUS  RESTORATION  PLAYS 
(1 660-1 820).  (Congreve,  Wycherley,  Gay,  Gold- 
smith, Sheridan,  etc.). 


